Your Happening World (December browser tab amnesty)

Here are some interesting articles cluttering up my browser tabs:

    Biopolitical Binaries (or How Not to Read the Chinese Protests) — The internalisation of this false binary in Western narratives risks resulting in misreading the Chinese protests by interpreting the protesters’ rejection of the authoritarian biopolitics of zero covid as a tacit demand for the necropolitics of the United States. At the same time, this type of binary thinking severely constrains our ability to comprehend the global lessons of the pandemic as we enter an age of collective crisis.
  • Victoria 3 Players Think Communism Is Too OP — Victoria 3 is a political simulation game that plays like accounting software. And currently, apparently even the game’s numbers agree with the so-called radical left that communism is the most economically efficient government system. Victoria 3 players have taken to the internet to complain that there aren’t any other ways of playing that are better than Marxism.
  • New dates suggest Oceania’s megafauna lived until 25,000 years ago, implying coexistence with people for 40,000 years — The U-series dating provides minimum age estimates, which means the fossils could be older. But since our estimates are supported by previous accelerated mass spectrometry dating, collectively the data provide a compelling case for the existence of megafauna in Sahul as recently as 25,000 years ago.
  • Thorsday Thoughts 276 – Thursday December 8, 2022 — While I tend to view Thunderstrike as a continuation of this run, it’s also its own thing. This is the final issue of Thor by Tom DeFalco and Ron Frenz after taking over at the end of 1987. They did two unrelated issues, one an untold story from Secret Wars focusing on Thor and the Enchantress, and one introducing Dargo, the possible Thor of the future. After a one-off by Jim Shooter, Stan Lee, Erik Larsen, and Vince Colletta, the run proper began and lasted for just over five years. It’s hard to sum up those five years in a simple statement, because, if there was one thing constant throughout those years, it was how willing Frenz and DeFalco were to change things up.
  • Scientists Identify 208 Natural Minerals That Formed From Human Activity — A new study has found that the incredible upsurge of new minerals around the time of the industrial revolution led to the unprecedented diversification of crystals on Earth, eclipsing even the Great Oxidation Event 2.3 billion years ago as the “greatest increase in the history of the globe”.
  • ‘Murder game’ cinema: Rollerball, its precursors and influences — here’s a list of Rollerball related movies I need to watch as well. Recommended fodder for those interested in dystopian sevneties sci-fi. (Some of the less obvious movies on here are by the same director.)
  • AND WHO DO YOU HIT? Three West German films on familial and economic violence in the Märkisches Viertel — examing and screening several socialist, realistic documentary movies coming out of seventies West-Germany depicting the life in a particular apartment building. Entirely different from the glitzy Hollywood sci-fi of the above list, but you can see some continuity here, can’t you?
  • My Stepfather Became My Dad the Day He Took Me to My First Football Match — My dad, Barrie, isn’t technically my dad. He’s my stepdad, but he became my dad on 12 November 1988 when Southampton beat Aston Villa 3-1 at The Dell, the club’s dilapidated former home. My birth father had effectively disappeared by then, leaving my mum with two sons, one of whom was football mad. That was the first game of football Barrie took me to.

I especially recommend Tom Williams’ very personal account of the way football brought him and his dad together.

“Get over it and go pee”

Alison Bechdel already knew the score in 1995:

Dykes to Watch Out For comic from 1995 on transphobia

The titular Dykes to Watch Out Fo are walking out of a bad movie, when Jillian has to pee. Mo, who has to do the same, doesn’t want to enter the loo because Jillian, though cool, is a trans woman. Lois tells her off, saying she’s not going to wait around all night just because Mo has a transphobia attack. So Mo enters the toilets, only to be challenged by a woman on whether she is in the right bathroom. (Mo looks rather butch after all.) Jillian defends her, telling the stranger to take a closer look. After this, Mo thanks Jillian and says she would do the same for her. This is however no longer necessary now her “nobody knows I’m a transsexual” t-shirt has worn out.

So there you have it, the absurdity of the bathroom panic laid bare in a twentyfive year old comic. Trans women are no danger, the idea that you can tell who is and is not a woman at a glance is deeply homophobic and barring people from pissing in the toilets they feel most comfortable in is ludicrous.

Graham, Graham, Graham Glinner — there really is no one dimmer

Graham Linehan has been mentioned here before, but now we’ve got a new person more mature than our Glinner and his very normal obsession with trans women. Twitch streamer Hbomberguy got pissed off so much at Glinner’s attempt to defund the trans youth charity Mermaids he decided to start a stream to raise money for it:



So far he’s managed to raise over £250,000 for Mermaids and made tens of thousands of people aware of how much of a transphobic knob Glinner is. Who said gamers were all trash?

Intersectionality is just another word for solidarity

I’m always leery of arguments like this, that want to dismiss the different axises of oppression various groups of people struggle with in favour of some vulgar marxist idea of the working class and not asking too many questions. Too often this has been used by alter kakkers to just dismiss any struggle that doesn’t fit in their century and a half old ossified world view:

Where people on the left should be focussed on what unites us, us here referring to the working class rather than the left in general (lol, as if that’s going to happen), as workers -the foundations from which we can build the new society- we now see attempts to stratify through definition the working class under the guise of intersectional analysis. An intersectional analysis is a useful tool to have in one’s box if one is studying Sociology or writing academic papers but in the real world it doesn’t translate well, not well at all. In fact one of the reasons that I began my abstention from generalised political activity was the emergence of this approach -along with the increasing popularity of privilege politics- as I saw early on that the praxis that would develop from this approach would inevitably see a return to the embarrassing ‘hierarchy of oppressions’ which permeated the radical politics of the 1970s/80s (before my time -I’m not that old!).

He may not be that old, but his criticisms are. There’s always been a tension within socialism about how to define the struggle. Rightwing socialists tend to define it narrowly, purely as the struggle of the working classes against the bourgeois and anything that isn’t directly related to that struggle as a distraction. Depending on the decade — or century — you’re talking about this could mean feminism, civil rights, gay rights, or today, intersectionality and online activism.

The leftwing has always defined the struggle much more broadly. There’s a long and proud tradition within socialism and communism of not just fighting for the rights of (white) working men, but also recognised from the start that you can’t build a classless society when half the population is still powerless because of their gender, that it’s immoral to let the welfare of the British worker depend on the continuing exploitation of the Indian worker. So there’s always been a strain in socialism that defined the struggle much broader than just defending workers’ rights, that strived for an utopia for all people.

That is intersectionality pur sang and the thing about it is that it works both ways. There’s always a tendency to assume that these causes always distract from your own, much more worthy and important one, but intersectionality also gets you allies. That’s what happened in 1984 when at the height of AIDS paranoia stoked homophobia a group of London gay men and lesbians reached out and supported the South Wales Miners Strike:



Both groups were canny enough to understand that they struggled against the same oppression. The gay and lesbian activists recognised the police violence and oppression the miners were subjected to from their own experiences with them and believed in solidarity enough to not just recognise it, but take action. And the miners reprociated, send delegations to Gay Pride, supported them in their struggle. It was of course mocked by the establishment — now the perverts support the pits, as The Sun put it.

But you might say, gay liberation, strikes, those are real political actions, real causes, not frivolity like what I’m talking about, but that was far from the mainstream view back in 1984. So many socialists for so long saw homosexuality as a capitalist perversion, not as part of their struggle, not something that could be easily portrayed in terms of class struggle. And that’s why this bloody cartoon included in the post annoys me so much:

cartoon by RednBlackSalamander

Not just because it’s a lazy cheap shot and doesn’t understand that in 2015 it’s really hasn’t been possible for at least a decade to pretend that that online space is less important than offline spaces. No, it’s because I’m old enough to know that all the examples of worthy causes given here –take back the night, ending rape culture, lgbt rights — would have been ridiculed and dismissed as fauxtivism and middle class vanities not too long ago. It’s breathtakingly ignorant.

Now AW Hendry started his post by mocking the Sad Puppies, which is how I stumbled upon it, thanks to Mike Glyer’s sterling work rounding up Puppy related material. He used it as his example of how people waste time with online activism and throughout his piece the unspoken assumption is made that online doesn’t matter and economic considerations should be much more important than cultural fights like this. What this misses is that, even apart from the simple fact that quite a few of us now live our lives as much online as in the real world, online follows you home — ask Zoe Quinn or any other SWATting victim. What he also misses is that the struggle over the Hugos is more than just the misplaced vanity of a few rightwing culture warriors: as Kameron Hurley explained, the Hugos meant she got $13,000 more in her post-Hugo book advance.

Not the highest of stakes perhaps, but for your average struggling writer that is a large chunk of money. I also have the suspicion for at least some of the ringleaders, this kerfuffle is a way to help themselves to some of that sweet, sweet wingnut welfare. People like Tom Krautman or Dave Freer may seem dangerously unhinged to normal people, but they’d fit in well with Vox Day’s old haunt, Worldnet Daily. Voxy himself of course is trying to establish his vanity press as a serious rightwing proposition and arguably does all this for the publicity. Which means for him at least it’s not the winning that’s important, it’s keeping the fight going, the better to keep fleecing suckers.

Nobody’s sidekick

SL Huang talks about writing intersectional characters and why they are important:

I am the protagonist in my own life, in my own story. I am not anybody’s sidekick.

Neither are my characters. Neither are they.

I have now, thankfully, gotten over the knee-jerk reaction that every axis I assign to a character off the straight white able-bodied American male (etc) is somehow an additional layer of disbelief I’m asking my audience to suspend. That I must justify these choices. If I ever feel that urge, I remind myself I am a perfectly realistic person, someone whose birth needed no special reason.

And I do not need anyone’s permission to be a hero.

For me personally, though I really don’t lack for characters with my sort of face, having more diverse, more realistically diverse characters in my fiction is only a good thing. The world really doesn’t need many more white men in its stories. Indeed, one of the reasons why I liked Huang’s Zero Sum Game and Half Life was that the protagonist looks nothing like me. One of the things that GamerGate and the Sad Puppies get so wrong is thinking that diversity is that nobody can actually enjoy reading or playing a character that isn’t exactly like you, when for many of us that’s actually the point.

For an idea of what I want to see more of, Chris Schweizer drew epic badasses from history for Black history month. Until science fiction and fantasy can show a similar list of awesome characters, there’s work to be done.