Notices by Fifi Lamoura (fifilamoura@eldritch.cafe)

@aral This is how structural inequalities get perpetuated and designed (unconsciously) into new systems, business as usual. Believing and even being "one of the good guys" doesn't prevent that, it actually kinds of guarantees it. Sure, nobody likes having to deal with resistance to their ambitions but you only get closer to equality and real systemic change when you let that resistance achieve actual momentum rather than getting mad it's preventing business as usual. Actual innovation and change IS often uncomfortable, especially for those who are comfortable.

A fantastic piece prompted by man vs bear...

"Patriarchy has everything to do with men, but at the same time, nothing at all. In a male-centered society where maleness is associated with power, what’s really being centered is power itself. What’s suppressed is mutual relationality. Patriarchy is intertwined with colonialism, racism, and other oppressive social structures based on hierarchy. It is a fundamental fracturing of our human wholeness."

https://bikepacking.com/plog/man-or-bear-debate/

@alanferrier The English are literally wallowing in their own shit at this point.

@aral 100% this. I find it so weird that people treat it like some binary game. I'm sick of repeating that if I have to be on a team, it's team humanity and nature (war doesn't just destroy humans and grease intergenerational cycles of violence and trauma, it also poisons ecosystems for generations as well....).

@aral Right, only the state can unleash violence, which it did apparently with Biden's blessing. Can we talk a bit more about how the IDF and the NYCPD train together?

@aral The US is the world's biggest arms dealer. And one of your own presidents once warned about the dangers of the military industrial confessional complex. And it's been lying about what democracy is ever since.

On this here day of Trans Visibility I will be out protesting my stupid, paternalistic, right wing government's "committee of the wise" convened to weigh in on trans rights. Dear reader, they are not wise, they are all cisgender old White people full of prejudice. Needless to say, this committee is unwise, harmful and everyone and all organizations in the community were very clear it was unhelpful at best.

https://www.ledevoir.com/politique/quebec/803235/comite-sages-identite-genre-personne-trans-parmi-membres?

https://montreal.ctvnews.ca/like-men-talking-about-abortion-trans-groups-troubled-by-lack-of-representation-on-que-committee-1.6674716

@aral This is even more extreme gaslighting than the Covid response in how it twists neglect and harm as being virtuous and a "cleansing" of "undesirables." Using the Holocaust to justify genocide is just so extremely cynical and dishonest....all while queer people, disabled people, Brown people and women are being oppressed by the far right and religious extremists at home.

My own shock does allow me to understand the denial a bit (and I experienced shock at the slow and fast horrors unfolding too, even if I'm not entirely surprised and so don't need to reflexively go into denial because I have a community that also sees reality even if we sometimes have different perspectives and opinions). I try to have some compassion for people who have less tools to manage and incorporate the reality of what is actually going on, if only to be able to collect them into constructive action and mutual aid at some point as things get even worse.

@aral Thank goodness Oxfam and others are calling this out as the bullshit attempt to whitewash complicity that it very clearly is. Also, Biden is simply copying Trudeau's lead here I suspect so it's an even more desperate play by Biden even than it appears (Trudeau announced this bullshit measure to try to placate Canadians quite a few days before Biden floated the idea).

@aral And it's just something they're saying, it's not even something they're doing.

@aral "go around Israel" Good grief. Refund the damn UNWRA and vote for a ceasefire not against it. It's not fucking rocket science. Also, Canada announced this bullshit idea days ago and it was just as much a "we're pretending to do something so we don't look as bad" move then by Canada as it is now by the US.

@HugoTNMilan @aral Ahem, more like monopolistic business practices. Silicon Valley has never actually been about competition on merits or innovation, it's always been about bubbles and creating monopolies.

Really interesting new insight into autoimmunity...

"Such immune system disorders also disproportionately affect women. In the US, four in every five autoimmune patients are women.

New research has found this can be traced to an interaction between the two X chromosomes in people who've got a pair, predominantly cisgender women.

When there's two X chromosomes available, a cell can only use the information from one, or things get a bit messy."

https://www.sciencealert.com/4-out-of-5-autoimmune-patients-are-female-the-x-chromosome-could-explain-why

@aral Or bloated, addicted and likely to die on the toilet? @w7voa

The Juice does the UK

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8sRoYvFTE3c

@aral I also follow French politics because what happens in France has a very big influence in Quebec and around the world (being yet another nation that colonized much of the world). This is also true of England. The US isn't the only imperialist force out there, even if it's been pretty dominant for a while. It's not great living at the nexus of American and French fascism and trying to get people to understand how they interconnect and feed into each other.

@Bossito @aral And the risk is that the firehose of terrible US news can drown out news about what's going on in our own countries that we can maybe actually do something about. What some in the US don't realize is that those of us outside the US realize how this is being organized on a global scale by far right Christofascists but a lot of people in the US (due to American exceptionalism) don't realize this...that is also concerning.

@aral I care and follow US politics but I also can't do anything about what's going on in the US because I'm Canadian, at times those of us who live in other nations need to also pay attention to our own politics (and people in the US would do well to also pay some attention to international politics, the rest of us can't really avoid knowing about US politics because of how the US dominates the world but you guys can easily ignore the rest of the world, to your own detriment).

@emilymbender The whole "the results will be beyond even our wildest dreams but let's not even consider the very foreseeable real world problems" vibe is strong. I'm sure this press release is adding to global warming.