Donald Trump can't pay his bond

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Climate change: Dire predictions

Yes, the patterns of living beings are changing, you're not mistaken

"You're not crazy. Spring is getting earlier. Find out how it’s changed in your town.": Readers told us how spring has changed where they live. Our map shows where leaves are sprouting sooner. Harry Stevens, Climate Lab columnist, Washington Post, March 13, 2024

Scientists have been sounding the alarm for years

"The Great Barrier Reef Has Been Forever Changed By Global Warming, Scientists Warn: Rising temperatures in 2016 caused a catastrophic die-off of almost 30 percent of the iconic reef. Dominique Mosbergen, CNN, Apr 18, 2018

The worst-case scenarios are probably correct

Global Warming: Our Most Dire Predictions for the Future of the Planet Are Probably Right, Sydney Pereira, Newsweek, Dec 7, 2017

Indeed, they are coming to pass

"Australia’s Great Barrier Reef suffers ‘extensive’ coral bleaching, as scientists fear seventh mass bleaching event," Helen Regan, CNN, February 28, 2024

‘Like wildfires underwater’: Worst summer on record for Great Barrier Reef as coral die-off sweeps planet, Rebecca Wright, Ivan Watson and Tom Booth, CNN, May 4, 2024

We are still trying to communicate it

Apocalypse How? What Novels Screw Up About Climate Change: We're obsessed with grim environmental tales, but most of them miss the point. Casey Williams, HuffPost, Apr 21, 2018

As one example, Williams says that “journalist David Wallace-Wells’ 2017 article 'The Uninhabitable Earth' fuses literary conventions with hard reporting to conjure apocalyptic visions of a warming world.”

Read it:

The Uninhabitable Earth: Famine, economic collapse, a sun that cooks us: What climate change could wreak — sooner than you think. David Wallace-Wells. New York Intelligencer. July 2017.

Seen from space, the rainforest has decreasing forest:

"In 2001, I flew my first flight into space aboard Space Shuttle Endeavour. Roughly a decade later, I commanded that same space shuttle on its final flight. That trip was my fourth journey -- and at least for now, my final one -- from this planet into space.

* * *

When I first looked down upon the Amazon rainforest in 2001, I saw vast areas of jungle and a wide and winding copper colored river that went on and on and on. A river that was impossible to miss and like no other on the planet. By 2011, however, the part that was most noticeable wasn't the river or the jungle but the large swaths of empty land.

* * *

This year has been an unequivocal disaster for the future of the planet. President Donald Trump has managed to take a wrecking ball to years' worth of hard work and painstaking negotiations. If not undone, our retreat from the Paris Climate Accords and the EPA's Clean Power Plan alone mean our planet's temperature will rise at a greater rate and our citizen's health will degrade. Other changes in environmental regulations on drilling and auto and appliance efficiency will only make matters worse."

&,dash; Mark Kelly: This year has been an unequivocal disaster for the future of the planet, Mark Kelly, CNN, December 27, 2017

Released yesterday, a sobering summary on findings in climate change research over the last year. Among other things, that Climate extremes are harming maternal and reproductive well-being. Increasing heat is making more of the planet uninhabitable. 10insightsclimate.science

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— Prof Lisa Schipper (@lisaschipper.bsky.social) October 29, 2024 at 3:35 AM

Lorber: 'Everyone was doing gender' (1994)

Judith Lorber, Paradoxes of Gender Chapter: 'Night to His Day': The Social Construction of Gender. (PDF) Yale University, 1994.

Lorber, p. 13

What I find most interesting is that last phrase: The onlookers who have opinions about how another man parents his baby are also doing gender. They're reading, interpreting, judging, maybe imposing gender on him.

Lorber says that

“bending gender rules and passing between genders does not erode but rather preserves gender boundaries. In societies with only two genders, the gender dichotomy is not disturbed by transvestites, because others feel that a transvestite is only transitorily ambiguous—is ‘really a man or woman underneath.’ After sex-change surgery, transsexuals end up in a conventional gender status—a ‘man’ or a ‘woman’ with the appropriate genitals (Eichler 1989). When women dress as men for business reasons, they are indicating that in that situation, they want to be treated the way men are treated; when they dress as women, they want to be treated as women...” (p. 21)

There is no escape. If you change your clothes, you’re signaling your gender, or others believe you are. If you change your body, you’re signaling your gender, or others believe you are. Everyone else is always trying to figure you out. There may be nothing you can do to stop them from trying to figure you out.

Furthermore, simply by attempting to manage where you fit within the given gender map, others see you as attempting to preserve the map itself. If you attempt to say anything about being a man or woman (including frustration with those categories), someone will blame you for believing in the categories.

”Although the possible combinations of genitalia, body shapes, clothing, mannerisms, sexuality, and roles could produce infinite varieties in human beings, the social institution of gender depends on the production and maintenance of a limited number of gender statuses and of making the members of these statuses similar to each other. Individuals are born sexed but not gendered, and they have to be taught to be masculine or feminine. As Simone de Beauvoir said: ‘One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman…; it is civilization as a whole that produces this creature…which is described as feminine.’ (1952, 267).” (p. 22)

Lorber says:

“My son attended a carefully nonsexist elementary school, which didn’t even have girls’ and boys’ bathrooms. When he was seven or eight years old, I attended a class play about ‘squares’ and ‘circles’ and their need for each other and noticed that all the girl squares and circles wore makeup, but none of the boy squares and circles did. I asked the teacher about it after the play, and she said, ‘Bobby said he was not going to wear makeup, and he is a powerful child, so none of the boys would either.’ In a long discussion about conformity, my son confronted me with the question of who the conformists were, the boys who followed their leader or the girls who listened to the woman teacher. In actuality, they both were, because they both followed same-gender leaders and acted in gender-appropriate ways.”

(Although, I’d argue, if all of them had agreed to wear makeup or to forgo it, or to split up on certain teams that wore makeup or didn’t, this itself would have been a kind of conformity.)

This line is really interesting: ”In the social construction of gender, it does not matter what men and women actually do; it does not even matter if they do exactly the same thing. The social institution of gender insists only that what they do is perceived as different.” (p. 26) And: “All men and all women can enact the behavior of the other, because they know the other’s social script: ‘’Man’ and ‘woman’ are at once empty and overflowing categories. Empty because they have no ultimate, transcendental meaning. Overflowing because even when they appear to be fixed, they still contain within them alternative, denied, or suppressed definitions.’ (J. W. Scott 1988a, 49). Nonetheless, though individuals may be able to shift gender statuses, the gender boundaries have to hold, or the whole gendered social order will come crashing down.” (p. 27)

I do not care for this

Lorber, p. 27

My problems with it:

Lorber is here making an assumption that "reconstruct[ing] genitalia" is done for the sole purpose of "match[ing] identity." A way to question this assumption: If there were no social gender differences between men and women, could someone still want to modify any part of their bodies. Presumably yes; they would simply have motivations other than controlling their gender presentation. Someone might want their nose reconstructed because they have a sense of what nose shape would be more beautiful for them, or because they have a medical need to reshape their nose, or both.

Why, then, should genitalia be excluded from the list of modifiable body parts? A person may want their own genitals to look or feel a certain way. They have needs and interests related to urination and reproduction. They feel sexual pleasure a certain way, or want to experience it differently, or they want to align something about their own brain–body communication, or they want to experience something that's more like what they believe people experience with Genital Type A rather than Genital Type B. This is not necessarily about the social construction of gender (at least, not as we know it today). People should be allowed to have autonomy over all parts of our bodies. And so we should be careful not to disparage this autonomy in ways that might lend support to those trying to criminalize auotnomy. It is autonomy like any other; if we insult it and fail to recognize its importance, we won't have it.

This points to a broader issue. If gender is eliminated — I mean its social aspects, not physical sex characteristics — life will be different for everyone. True, transgender narratives would be radically different, but so would cisgender narratives. To the extent there'd be no gender, there'd be no transgender or cisgender. Lorber is having us imagine a world with no trans people, but this is a world with no cis people. Everything in this world is different. So it is really getting overly specific to congratulate this hypothetical world for having no transsexual narratives of "of always having felt like" a man or a woman. There's a lot of other things this hypothetical world wouldn't have.

Lorber then goes on to to generalize that “women who become men rise in the world and men who become women fall” and to approvingly quote Janice Raymond as a source of insight about trans people's privilege (p. 28), so that should give some context on how many grains of salt are needed.

Remember: Onlookers, whether applauding or frowning, are doing gender. So, if you don't want to do gender, stop doing it.

I'm intrigued by this list:

Lorber, p. 30

Lorber, p. 31

Also noted:

“As a social institution, gender is a process of creating distinguishable social statuses for the assignment of rights and responsibilities. As part of a stratification system that ranks these statuses unequally, gender is a major building block in the social structures built on these unequal statuses.

As a process, gender creates the social differences that define ‘woman’ and ‘man.’ ... Members of a social group neither make up gender as they go along nor exactly replicate in rote fashion what was done before. In almost every encounter, human beings produce gender, behaving in the ways they learned were appropriate for their gender status, or resisting or rebelling against these norms. Resistance and rebellion have altered gender norms, but so far they have rarely eroded the statuses.” (p. 32)

Under the social construction of gender, “there is no core or bedrock human nature.” (p. 36)

Lorber did revise this book (I haven’t read the revised edition)...

...and publish another book that I suppose contains a drastically revised thesis.

'As Equals': 42 people defending women's and LGBTQ rights

"Las defensoras en Latinoamérica: 12 personas que protegen los derechos de las mujeres y LGTBQ+," CNN, 8 Marzo 2024

Activistas

Bianka Rodríguez
Florencia Guimarães García
Fernanda Falcão

Defensoras de ley

Paula Ávila Guillén
Sandra Mazo
Olimpia Coral Melo

Catalizadoras

Tarcila Rivera Zea
Anielle Franco
Julieta Martínez
Lolita Chávez
Teodora Vásquez
Leslie Collao

"The Defenders: 30 people protecting women's and LGBTQ+ rights," CNN, 8 March 2024

Activists

Hala Al-Karib
Fidan Ataselim
Nila Ibrahimi
Zhanar Sekerbayeva
Nisha Ayub
Clare Byarugaba

Academics

Mary McAuliffe
Judith Butler
Amel Grami

Advocates

Gissou Nia
Angela Mudukuti
Sibongile Ndashe
Malak El-Kashif
Monica Simpson
Griselda Mata
Riska Carolina
Estefania Vela Barba
Karuna Nundy
Rasha Younes

Catalysts

Erika Castellanos
Ferhan Güloğlu
Kinga Jelinska
Alexis McGill Johnson
Winnie Byanyima
Fadekemi Akinfaderin

Creatives

Emani Edwards
Hawon Jung
Faye Cura
Luciana Peker
Stephanie Musho

How CNN funds this series, 'As Equals'

FAQ:

"As Equals originally launched in 2018 with the assistance of a year-long Innovation in Development Reporting grant from the European Journalism Centre. The series kept going after 2019 thanks to commitment by CNN.

In October 2020, CNN announced that the series would expand with a new three-year grant of US $3.6m from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation."

What transphobia sounded like in the 1990s and 2000s — birth of the term 'gender ideology'

Kate Walton explains for CNN:

1990s and 2000s transphobia

"The anti-gender movement emerged in the early 1990s in response to international conferences that catalyzed recognition of gender at the United Nations and accelerated progress on gender equality, including the recognition of sexual and reproductive rights. ... In the early 2000s, the Catholic Church began sounding the gender alarm... This led to the emergence of the term “gender ideology,” which conservative and fundamentalist groups began using to refer to the broad swathe of issues they oppose, including LGBTQ+ rights, reproductive rights, and gender equality."

Now it's fascist

That link — the same link appears twice in the screenshot — goes to “Gender Equality and Gender Backlash,” a 2020 UN Human Rights report.

This is "connected to the political shifts being witnessed around the globe, away from liberal democracy and towards right-wing populism. As Hungarian historian Andrea Pető puts it: 'The anti-gender movement is not merely another offshoot of centuries-old anti-feminism but is a fundamentally new phenomenon that was launched for the sake of establishing a nationalist neoconservative response.'"

And now,

"in 2024, for anti-gender actors, the term “gender” now encompasses everything from the concept of gender itself, to gender studies, legal protections for transgender people, survivors of domestic violence and rape, and women and girls in general. In fact, according to the Association of Women in Development, the concept is now being used to attack all sorts of progressive “struggles,” including even environmental issues.

Podcast

If you're a Patreon subscriber to the Muckrake Podcast, listen to the May 3, 2024 episode "The Real Motivation For The Protests," especially the eight minutes 38:30–46:30. Analysis: Tucker Carlson is trying to mainstream Aleksandr Dugin’s ideas. Dugin wants a return to religious totalitarian power to serve as the source of meaning so people will be less individualist and, among other things, won’t be trans.

The US is funding it globally

See below: During the tail-end of the G. W. Bush administration, both Obama administrations, and the beginning of the Trump administration (2008–2017), 11 US-based organizations paid at least $1 billion to fight LGBTQ and women's rights in other countries.

Those links are:
Global Philanthropy Project
Reporting by CNN As Equals
unanimously passed on February 28

Read the original source

"Opposition to gender equality around the world is connected, well funded and spreading. Here’s what you need to know about the anti-gender movement," March 2024.

"In their [Judith Butler's] latest book, Who’s Afraid of Gender? (out now from Farrar, Straus and Giroux), the famed critical theorist frames the scourge of anti-trans legislation here in the U.S. as just one tentacle of a global neo-fascist crusade. The 'anti-gender ideology movement,' as Butler calls it, exists everywhere from Bolsanaro’s Brazil to Putin’s Russia to the TERFs of the United Kingdom and beyond. And though it may take slightly unique forms, the movement is united in its posing of 'gender' not so much as an identity, but as a conceptual container — a 'phantasm,' as they put it — for the perceived erosion of traditional (read: white, cis, and patriarchal) models of family and society."
— Wren Sanders, introduction to Judith Butler Knows What Makes Transphobes Tick, interview by Wren Sanders, Them, April 5, 2024

In that interview, Butler says:

"I tell a story in the acknowledgements about what happened in Brazil in 2017, when I was really shocked to discover that there was this whole right-wing movement called the anti-gender ideology movement, who had decided that I was a devil, or a demon, or a force from hell. [In Brazil], I was burnt in effigy, and that was pretty freaky. What I saw was that there was a right-wing idea of what gender is that had nothing to do with what I had written, or what other people in gender studies had written, or what was happening under the name of gender in the world among different generations. And yet I was called 'the Pope of Gender,' like I was leading all these beguiled young people over the cliff. ... I could show them why their ideas are wrong, but they’re not really reading; they’re just freaking out. They have this phantasm that they are working with, so the big question was how to dispel that phantasm, or engage it, or offer something contrary to it that could speak more powerfully."

We experience it as transphobia, as Butler explains:

""I think the primary way that we experience the anti-gender ideology movement in the United States is as transphobia. So I include transphobia as part of the anti-gender ideology movement, although there are forms of transphobia that are out there in the world that don’t know anything about that movement and may not know that they’re resonating with it, you know? So there’s that one complication. But in different parts of the world, to be against gender, like Putin, or Meloni, or Bolsonaro and Orbán, is to believe that there’s a natural law, a natural family where there’s a man and a woman; and they engage in sex within the institution of marriage; and sex is primarily reproductive; and that this universal and natural law should not be broken; and that the feminists who introduced the idea of gender identity are destroying not just the family, but also the nation."

U.S. corporations don't have to reveal CO2 emissions if they don't want to

Climate news:

"In 2022, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) proposed a climate disclosure rule that would have forced public companies to report their greenhouse gas emissions—from their direct emissions (also known as Scope 1 emissions), to emissions from their energy use (Scope 2), to emissions from their supply chain (Scope 3). It also would have required that companies report how climate change is impacting their bottom line.

But that’s not what happened. Instead, on Wednesday [March 6, 2024], the five-person SEC voted to adopt a climate disclosure rule that was significantly watered down. It is no longer mandatory for companies to report their emissions; instead it says that companies should disclose their greenhouse gas emissions if they consider them “material”—in other words, of significant importance to their investors."

— "How corporate America won the fight to keep its pollution secret," Arielle Samuelson, HEATED, March 8, 2024

Samuelson explains that this happened because of

"the conservative Trump-appointed judges all over the country— many of whom are Trump-appointed—striking down federal climate regulations. According to Clara Vondrich, senior policy counselor at consumer advocacy nonprofit Public Citizen, the world’s most polluting industries and GOP lawmakers threatened to sue if the SEC required them to report all their emissions. Those were not empty threats—within hours of the final rule being adopted, 10 Republican-led states had sued the SEC for overreach."

What's happening to news organizations in the mid-2020s

On March 5, Chris Hayes on the Why Is This Happening? podcast put out an episode, "A Mediapocalypse? with Ben Smith." Hayes has been working as a journalist since about 2001, when he was 22 years old. He was there when print publications first began to go online, and he saw the invention of social media. It used to be that reporters were needed to record facts, but now everyone has smartphones and can do their own reporting.

He says that while many outlets shuttered due to the 2009 financial crisis, the layoffs and closures of 2023 felt worse to him. He says he no longer understands where people in general find their fact-based news. Where can people get not just some information, but high-quality, true information? Social media platforms aren't reliable for this, and these days many people are retreating to group chats.

Blaming the messenger by calling it "fake news," even if it is, may not be a successful tactic. (Does anyone care if you make that analysis or judgment? Fake news is at least as profitable as real news, if not more so.) And now there's so little real news to which to turn instead.

[As I've heard other people put it: For conspiracy theorists, facts don't really matter. If most their claims prove false, it doesn't matter, because — like someone who pretends to be psychic — they'll gain fame and money from the few things they said that proved correct. This is how credulity and conspiracy-theory thinking works. It goes by "vibes."]

If news becomes a weird personal hobby for some people and isn't an essential part of the culture, democracy may not survive.

In this podcast episode, he interviews Ben Smith, former editor of BuzzFeed, now of Semafor. Smith believes that national and international news is healthy, but local news is disappearing. Local newspapers sued to be ad-supported by local businesses, but in the early 2000s Google disrupted that model because newspapers were no longer needed to announce what the local businesses were. Perhaps as a result, U.S. politics is becoming more focused on national rather than local issues. Politicians work at the level of Washington, commentators comment at the level of Washington, and that's how individual people understand it, rather than thinking about their home district.

(That's an argument, I'd insert, against the Electoral College. Votes don't need to be counted state-by-state if individuals aren't voting as residents of a state but simply as citizens of the same country.)

One big problem is that, in the pivot to online publication, 21st-century newspaper owners decided to give away their reporting essentially for free when in fact it costs money to make. They seemed to be running on an assumption that most publications will go under anyway, but the biggest one will survive and will somehow make money, so it's important to grow your readership so you can be the last newspaper standing. Well, that's what has manifested, and most local newspapers have died off.

For cable TV news, though, especially in the case of Fox, some of this process is happening in reverse: young people aren't turning on a specific news channel. They're instead turning to various smaller media outlets (podcasts, etc.) that are individually viable.

Online publishing platforms — especially the ones that work more as closed systems — tend to mystify their data and algorithms, and this provides an opening for people on those platforms to write lots of articles that position themselves as experts about how the system works. When their "expertise" begins to look attractive to others, they promise to teach others to become similar experts and stand apart from the crowd of experts. This does not add much value to society, especially if the site's algorithms aren't really that complicated or interesting and will probably change in a few months.

But that's all that a publication is going to get if they don't pay people to report news or increase their expertise on a specific topic. People will write about their existing expertise until they exhaust it or get bored of talking about it, and then the only additional expertise they will have developed along the way is their experience publishing on that platform, so they start talking about the platform.

Takeaway: Think about your values, what kind of platform you want, and how you'll feel when you use that platform.

On March 6, Talking Points Memo explained that in 2016 they took in nearly $1.7 million from third-party ads, but when they saw that number begin to collapse, they decided to pivot to a subscription model. The subscribers were there when ads no longer provided any significant income. In 2023, their income from third-party ads was less than 5% what it was in 2016. Had they timed this differently or not had cash to invest in it, it won't have worked.

Takeaway: If your business was like that, that's what you needed to have done then.

On March 7, Fernando Alfonso III for NPR quotes Graciela Mochkofsky, the dean of the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York, as saying: "I was trained as a journalist with this very, very strong, very, very strong sense that journalism is something that is not a given; it's something you fight for every day, just like democracy." ("Is journalism disappearing? These top educators have a lot to say about that")

Takeaway: Journalism professors don't know what to tell their students about how to work in journalism because there are few traditional jobs right now.

Jeff Jarvis wrote on January 24, "Is It Time to Give Up on Old News?" By "old news," he means journalism as it historically has often been practiced in the United States and as it has been perceived.

Yes, he says, it's time to give up. He's personally done with "old news’ wishful doomsaying, its credulous coverage of politics as sport, its bothsidesing and normalization of the rise of populist fascism, its refusal to call racism racism, its chronic lack of diversity, its dependence on access to power, its moral panic about technology, and the resource it wastes on copying and clickbait." As "our attention" isn't "a commodity to be owned, bought, and sold," neither are newspapers supposed to be in what's called "content business."

We don't have to deliberately kill off what's dysfunctional, but we should "stop throwing good money and effort after bad."

Instead: "support the emergent reinvention of journalism occurring in communities everywhere." Journalism ought to be "a service built on conversation, community, and collaboration." People need to think across academic disciplines and take leadership.

Jarvis writes:

"I say we must fundamentally reimagine journalism and its role in a society under threat of authoritarian, anti-Enlightenment, fascist takeover. I recently wrote about a journalism of belonging. With my colleague Carrie Brown, I helped start a degree program — a movement carried on by our alums — in Engagement Journalism. There are other movements seeking to remake journalism: Solutions Journalism, Collaborative Journalism, Constructive Journalism, Reparative Journalism, Dialog Journalism, Deliberative Journalism, Solidarity Journalism, Entrepreneurial Journalism, and more. What they share is an ethic of first listening to communities and their needs and an urgency to innovate."

Takeaway: Put your values first, and place much less emphasis on monetizing other people's attention spans.

By the way, history

Ronald Reagan "was responsible for doing away with the fairness doctrine which granted equal airtime for opposing viewpoints on contentious issues. He also sowed the seeds for conglomerate media when his administration’s FCC weakened the rules around how many media outlets a company could own. To be fair, Clinton put the final nail in that coffin when he passed The Telecom Act of 1996. It was an anti-competitive move that allowed consolidation of outlets..." — Erika Mustermann, Lost In Transition: Did You Hear About PinkNews? If you care about trans people, you might want to stop going there, Medium, August 20, 2024

What is this?

The platonic ideal of an Atlantic article: 'Things will be extremely bad under Trump but it's important to keep focus on how some of the people saying that are slightly exaggerating.' www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

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— Michael Hobbes (@michaelhobbes.bsky.social) November 1, 2024 at 9:50 AM

in 2024, would local news notice if you were an elected representative who stopped doing your job because you were in a nursing home?

A U.S. Congresswoman disappeared for the last six months of her term. Nobody noticed. Turns out she's in a memory care unit, & her staff (and apparently other people?) covered it up (though she was somehow propped up for an event a month ago?) WILD story

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— Timothy Burke (@bubbaprog.lol) December 21, 2024 at 4:08 PM

US Rep. Kay Granger, R-Texas, hasn’t voted since July. The Dallas Express reports that it found her in a “memory care and assisted living home” after she was “found wandering lost and confused in her” old neighborhood. She is 81 and a sitting congresswoman. dallasexpress.com/tarrant/excl...

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— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur.bsky.social) December 21, 2024 at 8:04 PM

Sara Sadek: 'Witnessing, action, and rest'

On awareness of the over 30,000 lives lost in Gaza over the past five months:

"The world is hemorrhaging sacred life. And just to name and honor that feels really important. It's OK that we're a mess, because we're watching something that is catastrophic. Also, I think for us to sustain any sort of activism for a long-term resistance movement, or to come together and do anything of substance, we have to be able to titrate between witnessing, action, and rest. Witnessing, action, and rest. And joy is an act of resilience. So is dance, so is song, so is coming together in community, so is sleep. We will burn out very quickly if all we are doing is witnessing."
— Sara Sadek, "How we radicalize ourselves with Sara Sadek": Counter-cultural motherhood, community building and our collective responsibility to meet this moment (and why we can all do our bit!). Fran Liberatore and Sara Sadek. A Life Unschooled. March 6, 2024.
(audio: 12:16–13:06)

Another thought:

“Walter Benjamin writes [in The Arcades Project] that every true waking is a reshaping of reality. He describes this waking as a technique: the reclamation of what is past, not as complete facts or truths but as a period of time that can be reshaped simply by making contact with the waker’s present. Benjamin’s interest is focused on sleeping and waking as collective acts. In this sense, revolution—or awakening—is to wake from a prolonged collective slumber, and Benjamin’s moment of waking is the moment in which memory is shaped anew, in which the group—the masses—gradually reclaims its self-awareness through political action and becomes capable of reformulating reality, of providing an explanation of the dream in which it was caught, and emerges from collective absence into a new reality.”
— Haytham El Wardany. “When Waking Begins.” Translated from the Arabic by Robin Moger. Excerpted from The Book of Sleep. Reprinted in the Paris Review. November 3, 2020.

We have to try:

"...one of the paradoxes of education was that precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience, you must find yourself at war with your society. It is your responsibility to change society if you think of yourself as an educated person."
— James Baldwin, "A Talk to Teachers," 1963

Pope does not want people to be the same

Background

Senior Vatican Cardinal warns ‘demonic’ transgender rights are causing the ‘death of God’, Nick Duffy, Pink News, May 18, 2016

2024

On March 1, Pope Francis addressed a conference at the Vatican. Regarding gender theory, he said: "I have asked that studies be carried out into this ugly ideology of our times, which cancels out the differences and makes everything the same." According to a Reuters article, the Pope mentioned "reading a 'prophetic' book called Lord of the World — a dystopian novel published in 1907 by a Catholic priest about a world where religion has no place — which warned of the risk of cancelling out differences between people."

— Pope says gender theory is 'ugly ideology' that threatens humanity: 'Cancelling out the differences means cancelling out humanity,' Francis said, Thomson Reuters, March 1, 2024

I have two comments here.

Religion is notably an area in which a human being can change their mind, change how they show up in the world, and thus change the way in which they are different. The Catholic Church throughout history has notably tried to pull people out of their original religions and draw them into the Catholic fold. It is hypocritical for the Pope to warn about a movement that allegedly "cancels out the differences and makes everything the same. This is projection. If you really want human difference, you want non-Catholics.

Furthermore, if you really, really want human difference, well, you want trans people.

Vatican Blasts Gender-Affirming Surgery, Surrogacy As Violations Of Human Dignity In a document called "Infinite Dignity," the Vatican also repeated its rejection of "gender theory." Nicole Winfield, AP, Apr 8, 2024

On the trope that trans people are repressed cis gay people with internalized homophobia

There's a common trope that most trans people are gay people trying to become straight, and would not be interested in changing their gender, were it not for the pressures of homophobia, and thus are not authentically transgender. This is just a false nonsense assertion that I've repeatedly argued against.

I note how it's deployed here:

— On the broadview.news site: "Gay, not trans: A powerful challenge to gender medicalisation enters the political mainstream." Feb 7, 2024.

The idea is that, if your "early" experiences aren't sexual in a certain way, you won't be able to feel, assert, or establish a different sexual orientation later in life.

It's a surprising claim, because of course people can generally reevaluate their feelings and experiences at any age. If feelings can be reassessed at all, there's no reason to assume they're age-dependent.

And the claim is homophobic in several ways:

• Cis gay people can come out as gay later in life. The timing of their coming-out experiences shouldn't be denied.
• Trans gay people exist. Their existence shouldn't be denied. Furthermore, the argument, when applied to them, shows up in reverse: it implies that they should have been prevented from transitioning to give them a chance to be straight, which surely sounds homophobic.
• Bisexuality seems to be erased from this discussion.
• It seems to rely on a very old "corruption of the youth" assumption about how kids turn into gay adults, i.e., if they're not allowed to be gay when they're young, they won't end up as gay adults.

There's also an inappropriate fixation on the idea that children need to have "decisive [sexual] experiences" that, in this example, the children in question have specifically said they do not want to have. The children don't need to be encouraged to have a gay development, nor a straight development, whatever that means, as long as the child is asserting that they do not want that kind of sexual experience (as they did not ask for it) and are instead more interested in gender transition.

Wasn't mysterious to these people in 1999

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