Hmm.

A new publication, in Cultural Studies <=> Critical Methodologies.

Intimacies of Rock

Ethnographic Considerations of Posthuman Performativity in Canada’s Rocky Mountains

Here’s the Abstract:

This essay engages feminist science studies and theories of performativity to inject with dynamism familiar figurations of static being. Through the modalities of ethnographic writing, memory, and embodied experience, I enact a lively engagement with Canada’s Rocky Mountains. By shifting the way we understand this unique, constitutive feature of the Canadian West, I suggest an approach to ethics that expands categories of agency, disaggregating it from realms of human exceptionalism. Through the analytic of performativity, I attend to the dynamic and agentive capacity/ies of glacial bodies, mountains, and lichen—nonhuman bodies considered passive and inert by prevailing epistemologies—to make/materialize meaning. I animate the argument that what we call nature is not a passive, immutable surface on which culture is inscribed, but rather is the production of active, agential practices, each containing divergent wills to power immanent with the capacity to make cuts of their own. The aim of this writing is to think through how mountains, and other such complex living systems, might pose a necessary series of questions to prevailing epistemologies and systems of epistemological capture.

I’m particularly interested in the part about the dynamic and agentive capacities of glacial bodies, mountains, and lichen, and the description of them as nonhuman bodies considered passive and inert by prevailing epistemologies. I’m deeply curious about the non-prevailing (the marginalized, the minority, the Other) epistemologies that consider rocks and mountains active agents. I’m very curious about what kind of will to power a mountain can have. I also wonder how feminism comes into it.

Bad news from Pakistan:

Pakistani officials said at least 14 people have been killed in a bomb attack outside a polio vaccination center in the southwestern city of Quetta on Wednesday. The attack appeared to target police, and came before vaccination teams were due to launch a three-day immunization campaign.

Nobody has stood up to say “we did it!” yet, but al-Qaeda is suspected.

Militants have claimed that polio vaccination programs are a front for espionage or used to sterilize Muslims.

Islamic clerics have told their followers that the West conspires against Muslims, and that they use a substance found in the polio vaccination to sterilize Muslim men.

The clerics also point to the case of a Pakistani doctor who was said to have run a fake vaccination program for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to help track down al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden.

I think the US has admitted that last item.

Senator Ayesha Raza Farooq, head of Pakistan’s anti-polio program, says fewer people are falling for the propaganda used by Islamist extremists.

“Far fewer parents are refusing the vaccine, while the number of newly infected children so far this year is less than 40,” the polio chief told the German news agency dpa.

However, Pakistan is still at risk, as more than 35,000 children are said to be without the polio vaccination.

Last year Pakistan declared a national emergency when a record 306 cases where tallied, the highest since 1998.

Of polio – a horrific disease.

Sarah Ditum at the New Statesman:

Daria Pionko was supposed to be safe. Or safer, anyway. That, at least, was part of the thinking behind the “managed prostitution area” established in the Holbeck area of Leeds in June 2014 and officially announced the following October. It was also a tidying-up exercise, in response to locals’ concerns about living alongside street prostitution. By suspending the laws on kerb-crawling and soliciting between seven at night and seven in the morning in one non-residential part of town, Leeds City Council hoped to draw all the city’s outdoor prostitution to one unobtrusive place.

Alongside this effective decriminalisation, a Sex Work Liaison officer was appointed to work with women in prostitution, who are often (and reasonably) too fearful of the law to appeal to it. On top of this, outreach workers reported that the area made it easier for them to bring them health and social care to women in prostitution. If you have any concern at all about the wellbeing of women in prostitution, those are both excellent developments – as is the release of women from the threat of prosecution, breaking the grim cycle of punishment and crime that catches so many.

But – in spite of that, Daria Pionko was found unconscious inside the managed area, and was pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital. She’d been beaten on the head and face. She wasn’t the only victim of violence.

In September 2014, Abdul Fulat picked up a woman from the managed area and subjected her to a prolonged, violent sexual attack. Two months later, Anthony Riley raped and robbed a 27-year-old woman who had been selling sex there. Ten months after that, the council declared the managed area “a success”.

The violence can’t be surprising to anyone, I should think. Even if the managed area is packed with cops (which it isn’t), the cops don’t oversee the actual fucking. The john ends up alone with the woman.

Yet in official documents about the managed area, the punters are astonishingly absent, gently muffled in circumlocution. “Consider the place where the sexual transaction happens as the place where there is most risk for sex workers,” runs one recommendation from the evaluation, as though danger were a matter of geography: it’s not being away from the managed area that creates the risk, it’s being isolated with a man who has paid for sex and feels entitled to take his satisfactions from a female body…

Because the problem with prostitution always comes from one thing without which it could not exist at all: the men. A man who pays for sex knows that the woman he’s paying anticipates no satisfaction from the encounter beyond a financial reward that she may direly need (after all, there’s be no need to pay if she was having sex for her own genuine pleasure), and yet he doesn’t find anything obnoxious about purchasing her consent. Maybe it’s even a turn-on for him. How much do you have to dehumanise a woman to think it acceptable to use her like that? How much easier to be violent to someone you already see as inferior?

But at least the neighbors aren’t disturbed.

I saw a ridiculous item on Facebook yesterday, comparing Obama urging reform to gun laws while surrounded by children with Hitler urging reform to gun laws while surrounded by children.

Our friend Stewart found and translated an item from the Deutsches Nachrichtenbüro, 21 March 1938.

A new weapons law.

Berlin, 21 March. In the latest edition of the Reich law gazette a new weapons law is announced which was recently decided upon by the Reich government and which replaces the defensive weapons law of 1928, as well as a series of weapons directives from the emergency period.

The new law is the result of an examination of the weapons law in order to see which relaxations could be made in the current legal situation in the interests of the German weapons industry, without endangering the maintenance of public security. The pre-condition of any relaxation of the current weapons law must naturally be that the police authorities remain in a position to prevent without hindrance the acquisition and possession of weapons by unreliable persons.

The obvious fundamental point of ensuring that weapons are not possessed by enemies of the people and the state, as well as other elements that pose security risks, will be taken care of in the new law by enabling the police to forbid such persons from acquiring, possessing or using weapons of any sort. As this makes it possible to forbid any ownership of weapons considered undesirable by the police, it was possible to permit, among other things, a relaxation of the restrictive directives, in order to permit an improvement of conditions which would benefit the economic situation of the public in general and particularly that of the German weapons industry and the workers employed in it.

Thus, the acquisition of weapons will in the future only be possible with police permission, as far as pistols or revolvers goes. The necessity to obtain a permit to purchase ammunition is no longer in force.

The restrictions on the free circulation of cutting or thrusting weapons dating from the emergency period are, for the most part, rescinded.

In other ways, too, the law contains a series of relaxations compared to the current law. Of the many other new points, one should mention the basic prohibition on selling weapons or ammunition to those under 18 years of age. In addition, the granting of a permit for manufacturing or acquiring weapons will be linked to being of German nationality, to personal reliability and to functional aptness. Jews may not receive a permit.

The provisions of the new law, which goes into effect on the 1st of April this year, are supplemented by a comprehensive set of rules by the Reich Minister of the Interior, which has also been published in the Reich law gazette.

“Deutsches Nachrichtenbüro”, 21 March 1938

Not quite what Obama is suggesting.

Nick Cohen tears into the pope and the pro-theocracy left.

The only respectful way to mark the first anniversary of the Paris killings is to honour the memory of the dead by fighting for the Enlightenment values they lived by and died for. Whether we can is moot. Anglo-Saxon societies have enjoyed the privilege of Enlightenment freedoms for so long our defences have fallen into disrepair. We fool ourselves into thinking we are in a post-Enlightenment world. The old battles appear dead and gone, even though all around us murderous fanatics remind us that they intend to fight the war all over again.

It’s like vaccinations all over again, isn’t it – we’re so used to our freedoms that we don’t realize how shit it would be if we lost them. We take them for granted, we assume they’ll always be there, we feel safe enough to throw friendly bouquets at those funny little men in Nigeria or Iraq or Bangladesh who aren’t going to come bothering us.

Charlie Hebdo was free at all times and dared to exercise its freedom in public. So many lies have been told about it by the regressive left that I must remind you that its journalists were at the forefront of the campaigns against the French far right and in favour of asylum seekers.

But it would not refuse to mock sharia law because polite society preferred to look away. Nor could its journalists in conscience lay into the Catholic church, while leaving radical Islam alone. Where is the satirical edginess in savaging the beliefs of Catholics, who will not murder you, while passing on Islamists who might?

So they were killed, and many on the “left” carry on blaming them to this day.

The pope responded to the murders of satirists by lecturing their corpses. You cannot insult or make fun of the faith of others, he said, as he came as close as he dared to blaming the victims. A man’s religion was like his mother, he added. And anyone who insulted his mother could “expect a punch”.

Last week, the Vatican changed its line without changing its mind, the tactic of every cornered propagandist in history. Perhaps it realised that the pope’s claim that you could not satirise militant religion without expecting a punch in the face or a bullet in the head might unnerve even the most uncritical churchgoers. Instead, it tried to pretend that militant religion had nothing to do with religion.

Hebdo had marked the grim anniversary by putting a cartoon of a blood-spattered God carrying an assault rifle on its cover. “The assassin is still out there”, read the headline. Rather than have the sense and decency to keep its mouth shut, the Vatican denounced Hebdo for “hiding behind the deceitful flag of an uncompromising secularism” – this about a magazine that never “hid” from danger and whose staff had been the victims of truly “uncompromising” murderers.

The “left” and the pope, attacking our secular freedoms from a place of safety.

It may be objected that the New Testament is less gory that the Old. But Christ no more forbad slavery, rape, torture and genocide than did the Ten Commandments. Christians in power engaged in orgies of persecution of one another, of non-believers, of witches and of Jews. Indeed, the true Judaeo-Christian tradition was the 1,600-year tradition of Christians murdering Jews. What civilisation Judaism and Christianity possess came from the outside. They did not reform themselves, which is why calls for a Muslim reformation so spectacularly miss the point. Civilisation came from the battering that religion took from the Enlightenment, from sceptics, scientists, mockers and philosophers, who destroyed their myths and exposed the immorality of their taboos.

Charlie Hebdo told us a truth that too many do not like to admit: anyone who tries to do the same to Islam today can end up dead.

While the pope discreetly cheers in the background.

Think about corsets for instance. Yes, corsets.

We all know they were hella uncomfortable, and bad for the internal organs – but I’m not sure I had realized they were also bad for mental functioning.

Elizabeth McGovern, one of the Downton Abbey crew, spent a lot of time wearing them, and she says they are. It makes sense, of course – obviously you can’t breathe properly in them, and obviously breathing properly is important for mental functioning – but I don’t think I’d made the connection until I saw her say it on some dopy PBS special about How Fabulous is Downton Abbey the other day.

Elizabeth McGovern is talking about restrictive underwear. Or more precisely – since we are talking about the new season of Downton Abbey, in which the action has moved into the free-and-easy Twenties – she is talking about the absence of it. ‘There is no way,’ she says, speaking heavily and with the conviction that can be born only of bitter experience, ‘that I can convey to you what a profound experience it is not to be wearing a corset. In the series, we’ve been through the years leading up to the First World War, the years during it, and now we’re in the years after it, and I have actually physically inhabited the clothes of each era in that I have not only tried them on but spent the major part of my days wearing them.

‘Corsets are so uncomfortable that they drive me mad, and it is incredible how much it changes your world view to be out of them. You can move around so much more freely, and the passage of air is not constricted – you have more oxygen making its way to your brain so you have much more ambition, much more desire to achieve things and connect with the outside world…’

I didn’t fully realize that, specifically, but I resisted the confining nature of girls’ clothing from earliest childhood. I detested skirts, and wore jeans or corduroys whenever I possibly could; I whined and resisted whenever I was told I had to put on a dress. Trousers were freedom and skirts were constraint; it was that simple.

It’s a funny thing the way female clothing is designed to hobble and restrain women, and women put up with it.

Oh good god – this exists on Twitter – #JeSuisNero. Nero is the loathsome professional misogynist Milo Yiannopoulos. Why are imbeciles saying they are Nero aka Milo Yiannopoulos? Because Twitter removed his verification check, as punishment for being a loathsome professional misogynist and harasser.

He lost his verification check on Twitter, so people are comparing him to Charlie Hebdo.

I want to vomit.

Travis Longcore takes on the attack on science at Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, saying he stands with Linda Sue Beck.

Linda Sue Beck. It is at her desk that Ammon Bundy, leader of the group of armed anti-government religious fanatics occupying Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, has set up shop. As a federal biologist, like my father was for decades, she works to steward the resources that are held in common trust for all Americans. My stomach turned as the report came through the radio today — approaching a week into the occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge — and I heard the descriptions of the Bundys picking through her belongings and ridiculing her work.

“She’s not here working for the people,” Ammon’s brother Ryan is quoted as saying. “She’s not benefiting America. She’s part of what’s destroying America.”

That made me extremely angry too – especially coming from men who were occupying a federal wildlife refuge at gunpoint.

The occupiers of the refuge poke fun at Beck, her research on fish, and the normal trappings of a research station, including a dried bird in a storage area. They incredulously claim that the bird is “what they’re going to kill people over.” Presumably “they” is the federal government, and they mean to convey that Nature — the birds, the fish, the land — has no use or value.

I’m guessing the word “sustainable” doesn’t mean much to them.

Science and the National Wildlife Refuges are intertwined, with an entire model of species conservation and management emerging from regulated hunting and fishing with wildlife refuges at its core. National Wildlife Refuges are places where pathbreaking scientific research has taken place that has led to the great breakthroughs of wildlife management: research on the impacts of lead shot and its replacement by steel shot, the effects of DDT and its subsequent ban, and of course the impacts of harvest on fish and game populations. I know; refuge names were etched into my adolescent vocabulary as my father’s research sites. Patuxent. Missisquoi. Moosehorn. National Wildlife Refuges are secular shrines to wildlife science and scientific management. Do politics and consensus play a role in their management? Certainly, but the National Wildlife Refuges and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service are built on the bulwark of the science of wildlife and fisheries sciences.

The armed takeover of Malheur National Wildlife Refuge is, therefore, not just an attack on a federal property. It cuts deeper than that. It is an attack on the modern science-based approach to land management and it is an attack on the value and worth of science and scientists in the United States.

That’s not surprising, he goes on, considering that the Bundys are fanatical Mormons.

The occupiers are photographed kneeling in prayer at the refuge. In Linda Sue Beck’s office. Attacks on science from those with extremist religious views are now an unfortunate part of the American political landscape.

They always have been.

Unfortunately, the ill-informed reporters sent to cover the slow-motion catastrophe in Oregon fall into the rhetorical trap of the Bundys and their anti-scientific talk-radio enablers. When the occupiers blithely talk of putting the land “to use” again (as if scientific research, recreation, hunting, fishing, education, and all manner of public access were not “use”), the CNN reporter mindlessly repeats the trope, implying that the occupiers have a legitimate demand in wanting to work the land, as if it were some sort of de Tocquevillian tragedy that one of the most productive migratory bird stopover sites on the Pacific flyway was not being overrun with cattle by the ranchers from Utah. No, Malheur National Wildlife Refuge does not need to be worked, and CNN should have reporters that know better than to take the claim at face value.

That would be an improvement.

The New York Times takes a squint at the “give all the land to us” movement behind the Bundy putsch.

Ken Ivory, a Republican state representative from Utah, has been roaming the West with an alluring pitch to cattle ranchers, farmers and conservatives upset with how Washington controls the wide-open public spaces out here: This land is your land, he says, and not the federal government’s.

Is it indeed? How? According to whom or what? On what terms? With what mechanism for dealing with conflicts? If it’s “their” land it’s presumably “my” land too so what if I want to protect it from development and “they” want to develop it?

How did it get to be anyone’s property in the first place? It was seized, that’s all. It doesn’t belong to cattle ranchers more than everyone else.

Mr. Ivory, a business lawyer from suburban Salt Lake City, does not fit the profile of a sun-scoured sagebrush rebel. But he is part of a growing Republican-led movement pushing the federal government to hand over to the states millions of acres of Western public lands — as well as their rich stores of coal, timber and grazing grass.

In other words a movement pushing the feds to hand over public lands for exploitation so that a few people can get very rich, as opposed to regulating and conserving according to criteria other than making a lot of money in a hurry by stripping everything.

This Ivory dude founded a group that’s funded by the Koch brothers.

In the past few years, lawmakers across the West have offered up dozens of bills and resolutions seeking to take over the federal lands inside their borders or to study how to do so. Some of the legislation has been aimed at Congress, to urge it to radically revise the laws that have shaped 550,000 square miles of national forests and terrain run by the federal Bureau of Land Management, stretching from the Great Plains to the Pacific.

The whole thing is just “fuck the common good, give it to us so that we can use it to death for big bucks.”

In practice, local land disputes — fueled by deepening antagonism toward federal land agencies — now unfold like social-media passion plays. Last summer, armed groups intervened by providing security and standing guard at mines in Oregon and Montana that had received stop-work orders from the Bureau of Land Management. And in December, Phil Lyman, a commissioner in San Juan County, Utah, received a 10-day jail sentence after he led a protest ride on all-terrain vehicles through a federal area that had been closed to motorized use.

“All I did was drive down a canyon road,” Mr. Lyman said. “It seems to be getting worse, and the federal agencies, they are expanding. Their restraints are being overstepped. It’s not the way this country was set up. It’s not the founders’ design.”

Well the founders weren’t familiar with motorized vehicles, were they. They also weren’t familiar with a population of 321 million people, were they. There are a lot of things they weren’t familiar with. They don’t have the last word on everything.

“The land policies now are, basically, lock it up and throw away the key,” said Leland Pollock, a commissioner in Garfield County, Utah, a county roughly the size of Connecticut with pine forests and stunning red-rock spires. “It’s land with no use. The local economy’s really suffered as a result. Grazing has been reduced. We used to have a thriving timber industry — that’s all but gone.”

Whereas if the feds gave the forests to the timber industry, they would be gone in a few years.

Mark Zuckerberg took the baby to the doctor.

Doctor’s visit — time for vaccines!

See what he did there?

The Washington Post reports on the reactions:

The nearly 70,000 comments on Zuckerberg’s post run the gamut of pro-vaccine and anti-vaccine arguments. On the one hand, users have pointed out, scientists credit vaccines with eliminating formerly widespread diseases such as smallpox, and severe allergic reactions to vaccinations are rare.

Yet, many Americans, including Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, doubt the medical efficacy of vaccines and have pointed to their potential dangers. During a September 2015 GOP debate, Trump recounted that the 2-year-old child of one of his employees “got a tremendous fever” and “now is autistic” after getting vaccinated.

People just have no clue. It’s like feminism – most people now have no clue how bad it was before the renaissance of feminism in the late 60s. Most people now have no clue how bad it was before vaccinations, so they freak out about statistically tiny risks while ignoring the massive risks of skipping vaccinations. No clue.

New York to LA