Category: rants

Ranting

personby Gillian Polack
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I wrote a rant on Facebook. I want to copy it here because the cause of it affects so many people and I think it would be good to find it again. Let me explain first, though.

My ethnohistorian self looks at what happens in the world around us as evidence of human lives. I’m always looking for patterns. Right now, finding patterns and interpreting them well is more important than it’s ever been for me, because of the level and nature of antisemitism in Australia. I keep an eye on what our Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion is doing, and I find it has its own patterns and, at this point, it doesn’t see the rest of Australia clearly. It only sees what it’s shown, and some of the interpretation is done through the lens of groups who are part of the problem. Cross-questioning should not be up to 66% led by groups that are known for their antisemitism, but on some days it is. That affects the picture we all see. I make my own analyses, then, to keep what the RC does in perspective. I keep my own analysis in perspective using a truckload of tools. I watch some of the top ten shows on TV so that I’m in tune with the stories others see and hear. I keep an eye on social media. I make sure I’m part of events when I can. Last Saturday I was on a stall at Geek Expo. I wore nothing to indicate I’m Jewish (I don’t like tempting fate) but I watched and listened and I talked to many people. I’m beginning to learn the pattern and shape of antisemitism in this country.
What I wrote on FB just now was about one of the trails of hate spread so liberally across social media. I used several search terms to bring up people talking specifically about that topic, and I also looked at the new and at commentaries on the news, on the timelines of people who are known to be Jewish (eg a certain film director), and also with some of the major figures who talk politics in Australia. One thing I didn’t do this time was look at commentary by noted Jewish social media folks, so this doesn’t include the comments on their posts.
As much as anything, today’s post is about how I see the world, which is always as a writer (everything contains stories) and as an historian (everything contains evidence). it’s also an insight into what it’s like being a Jewish Australian at the place where 5 different branches of Australian antisemitism hit, but that’s not something to talk about today.

 

There is a pattern. If it’s Monday evening in east coast Australia, then the new wave of antisemitism hits social media. Sometimes it lasts until the weekend and sometimes it fades in a couple of days. Today’s wave is fairly precise. It’s an old one, revisited, and it riffs on one of last week’s waves.
That wave said, “If Israel was only completely obliterated, there would be no problems in the Middle East.” None of those pushing this line asked what would happen to Jews in Israel, but I asked a couple of people (who do not know to block me yet, obviously) and they explained that, since no-one in the Arab world hates Jews or has ever killed a Jew, they do not know why it’s even a question.
Some of them also say that there’s no antisemitism in Australia. I followed a little thread where someone asked how Bondi fitted into the ‘no antisemitism in Australia’ notion, and the person who asked was blocked, but the ‘no antisemitism’ person took that same thought elsewhere. They know there is antisemitism, but they’re in denial for their own reasons. Others (who I didn’t talk to because… not so safe) said that the world would be better with no Jews. That’s the old thread. It is not simple and it is unkind.
The new one (which is also an old one, but present in so many places this evening) is more polite. The new wave of hate says that Zionism has nothing to do with Judaism. It’s an evil thing that touts supremacy and includes murder. The actual history of Zionism is irrelevant here (though the history of carefully cultivated antisemitism is not) – and if you want to see the range of definitions of Zionism from a snapshot I did a while back, let me know and I’ll share the links again.
The big thing is that I don’t know anyone Jewish who uses this definition. I know a couple of people who might, but they’re not people who talk to me. Those couple of people are both quite far left.
Why is the use by Jews so important? Because the same people who have this curious definition of Zionism also have a potted definition of Judaism. We’re a religion, simply, with no links to the ancient Levant and only modern culture. Excuse me while I take a break to sing Shir Ha’Maalot, which is appropriate at this point for so many reasons.
I’m finished singing.
How do most of these people use those definitions? They find comments made by obvious Jews (especially famous ones) and correct their self descriptions.
It’s very Orwellian. Reshape everyone’s thoughts on a subject by using the same words and phrases and correcting people over and over again. It’s Jewsplaining, but with intent to create 1984.
I am going to strongly suggest that if you don’t know how a Jewish friend sees themselves and describes themselves, you ask them. You’ll get our answers, not a single standard ‘this is the only way of saying it’ except from those of us who like shaping the world with straightforward constructions. This comes down to how a person sees themselves in the world, so that is what you should put ahead of most other things if you want to actually talk to Jews and defend our right to exist as Jews. You don’t have to like any given person’s self-definition. But you do need to accept it as their self-definition ahead of the carefully crafted definitions applied by bigots.
Within Jewish culture, each self-definition plays a part. There are concepts we share, and concepts we craft by creating a complex composition. We’re all voices in a choir. Some choirs walk a little bit to the side and create their own mix, but they’re still part of Am Yisrael.
The thing about Judaism is that it doesn’t force one simple view. We argue and discuss and even have an approved rabbinic method of shelving impossible arguments so that we can move on to possible ones.
Redefinition by someone imbued with Jew hate is not just going to change the public way others see Jews, it’s going to chip at who we are by not letting us be ourselves outside closed communities. The choir is being pelted with rocks for not singing the right song in the right way… and that song and that right way may not have anything to do with what the choir was singing or why the choir was singing or who the choir was singing for.
This is an old trick. It shuts down Jewish voices. Every time someone tells someone else who they are without checking with them first, to find out how they see themselves, they’re saying “Who you are is unimportant. You are a lesser human being than I am.”

An addendum:
Miss Manners needs to intervene. If you’ve been shouting politics, your politics might have made your Jewish friends aware that you are not safe to speak with about certain subjects. Check with them before you ask them questions. They may not want to answer because they may not be as trusting (or as safe) as they were a few years ago.
I understand that everyone’s politics is important, but left wing politics in Australia have led to a lot of Jew hate. Otherwise good people are being treated with caution, even if they don’t know it, because they shouted “Globalise the intifada” but never asked Aussie Jewish friends whether we were OK after Bondi. I dropped many hints about ‘talking to your friends’ in the last 3 years, but most people didn’t. If you didn’t (thought nice thoughts but never called or had a cuppa) then think twice before suddenly invading a friend’s life with “How do you self-define.” Explain why you didn’t talk to them, perhaps, then ask if it’s possible to talk?

[Reprint] Overwhelmed by Bad News? Looking Away is Not the Fix

personby Deborah J. Ross
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Why 40 per cent of people are avoiding the news, according to a psychologist

Ali Jasemi, Wilfrid Laurier University

During several recent conversations, people have told me that they’ve stopped checking their phones in the morning. Not because nothing was happening, but because everything was. They described the feeling as standing under a waterfall of perpetual bad news.

This experience is far from an isolated one. According to Reuters Institute’s 2025 Digital News Report, 69 per cent of Canadians at least occasionally avoid the news now.

Globally, 40 per cent report they at least sometimes or often do the same, the highest figure ever recorded. People shared consistent reasons for this: the news put them in a bad mood, they felt overwhelmed and powerless to act.

As a researcher in developmental psychology, focusing on social development and psychological well-being, I argue that news fatigue is not laziness, weakness or a generational decline in civic interest. It’s the predictable response of a human brain meeting an environment it was never designed to navigate.

Wired for bad news

Long before smartphones or even the printing press, our cognitive architecture was shaped by a single problem: stay alive long enough to reproduce. Our ancestors whose attention drifted past the rustle in the grass left fewer descendants than those who froze, looked and listened.

The brain that paid attention to threats was the brain that survived.

This is the foundation of what psychologists call the negativity bias, one of the most replicated findings in cognitive science. Across decades of research, the human mind has been shown to weigh negative information more heavily than positive, attend to it faster and remember it longer.

A predator nearby mattered more than a beautiful sunset. The cost of missing a real threat was death, while the cost of overreacting was a few minutes of wasted vigilance. The asymmetry made this bias adaptive.

Here is the problem: the human brain has not changed since then. We are the same species as we were thousands of years ago. What’s changed is the size of the world it’s asked to scan for threats.

Scanning the whole world

For most of human history, the threats our nervous system processed were local. A neighbouring tribe. A drought. The illness of a child we personally knew. Information about distant places would barely arrive, and if it did, it was mainly irrelevant.

In 2026, the same neurological system is being asked to absorb a war in one region, a financial shock in another, a climate disaster in a third and a violent crime in a fourth, all before lunchtime.

A study published in the scientific journal Nature Human Behaviour examined more than 105,000 real news headlines viewed nearly six million times. Each additional negative word increased click-through rates, while positive words had the opposite effect.

Recent studies suggest people around the world demonstrate measurably stronger physiological responses to negative news than to positive news. The body is reacting before the mind has decided whether the threat is relevant.

Some researchers have introduced a clinical framework for what happens in this instance called Problematic News Consumption (PNC) — a pattern of news engagement that results in preoccupation, dysregulation and disruption to daily functioning. In their 2022 study, the researchers found that 17 per cent of American adults qualified as having severe levels of PNC. Among that group, 61 per cent reported feeling unwell quite a bit or very much, compared with six per cent of those who didn’t.

For minority populations, news fatigue may be even more consequential.

Repeatedly witnessing harm directed at our own groups, even when we’re not the immediate target, can have a significant psychological impact on people from the same group affiliation. For racialized communities, such as immigrants, the cognitive load could be even heavier, and the option to simply stop watching is much harder to exercise when the news is about their country of origin.

Looking away is not the fix

What’s the solution to news fatigue? Well, it’s not avoidance. A democracy depends on informed citizens.

Many adults already cite the spread of misleading information as a major source of stress. Withdrawing from accurate, trustworthy information only deepens the problem. We’re wired to pay more attention to bad news, and that kind of content will find its way to us one way or another.

The fix is to manage the consumption and the sources.

Several approaches can help manage news fatigue and protect mental health. Containing news consumption to defined windows of time reduces the sense of being overwhelmed. Choosing depth over volume also matters: one carefully reported long-form article will inform you better than bursts of random, unreliable and emotionally loaded posts on Instagram.

There is also value in distinguishing between information and action — research on perceived control and stress consistently shows that the gap between awareness and agency is one of the strongest predictors of psychological distress. Identifying what you can actually do about what you read in the news, however small, regulates that response.

Finally, be wary of “rage bait” — intentionally provocative messages or content designed to boost engagement on social media platforms by eliciting negative reactions. Recognizing that certain content creators want to provoke rather than reflect reality creates useful cognitive distance.

The news will not become less “heavy.” But our relationship with it can become more deliberate. Our brains were not built for this scale of input. They were, however, built to learn to adapt.The Conversation

Ali Jasemi, Lecturer, Psychology, Wilfrid Laurier University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Continue reading “[Reprint] Overwhelmed by Bad News? Looking Away is Not the Fix”…

Australia – again

personby Gillian Polack
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I am late! I am late and want to talk about Jewish matters.

The Australian Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion has just released the total number of submissions and it’s a lot higher than anyone expected. I predicted 10,000 submissions and everyone around me said that 5,000 would be a lot and would reflect what was happening in our country a lot more. Even 10,000 was considered an overprediction because of the way most people saw antisemitism in Australia, in other words. So what does 20,000 mean? That things matter. That people have things to say.

What the submissions give us is something amazing, especially given that this is a census year and that we can fit those submissions into a snapshot of Australia in 2026 (the last census was in 2021, and you can see what it shows about jewish Australia here: The-Jewish-Population-of-Australia-Report_2021-Census-1.pdf . There are issues with the way data was collected and how unsafe the collection made Jews, and that Judaism was not listed as a religious or cultural option ie people had to write it in manually, but it still gives some indication of who we are in Jewish Australia. We have a surprising number of old people, for instance, and an unsurprisingly high average level of education.

Put these 20,000 submissions into analysis the way that Mass Obersvation Project has done for the UK, and it becomes an enormous data base for research into one aspect of Australian life: how people see Jewish Australia and how Jewish Australia sees itself. What we are. Who we are. How we deal with hate. This will lead to insights into how Australia sees other cultural and religious groups in the country. It has the capacity to change Australia’s self-knowledge.

What’s really interesting is how silent the far left is about the number of submissions. We don’t yet know if those submissions reflect their views as leading or typical. I strongly suspect that their views are bigoted and hateful, but I’m willing to wait and see how the data presents itself. And I want to know what Australia does with all this information about how we think and feel.

Given that the trigger was the Bondi murders and there is a very strong likelihood that those murders were caused by links to certain terrorist groups, we can’t exclude the outside world. But we can take a close look at ourselves and find out who we are and what we want to be.

Australia is in a strange place politically. Everything’s changing. I suspect those 20,000 submissions are part of that change. Who we are and how safe we are and the paths we take are all up for grabs in this very interesting year.

Just Say No

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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I have been following the current regime’s vicious attack on gender-affirming care for minors – a subset of its abuse of trans people in general – for Unbreaking.org, and this week I wrote a mini-briefing about it. After struggling to get a complex issue down to a few sentences, I realized I had a lot more to say.

The effort to block gender-affirming care for minors is an excellent example of why everyone in this country should fight back against the abusive actions of the extremists in power.

Starting in the summer of 2025, the Department of Justice began sending administrative subpoenas to hospitals and other medical offices that offered gender-affirming care to minors. The subpoenas sought extensive data on their patients.

They did this quietly, without fanfare. Only a few reporters noticed, most of them with LGBTQ+ publications.

Administrative subpoenas are issued by federal agencies and not approved in advance by a judge. They are supposed to be used to further an agency’s regulatory authority, but their use has been substantially expanded.

I suspect DOJ expected the recipients to be frightened and just send the documents. After all, at the time they first sent them, major media companies, wealthy universities, and big law firms were caving in the face of pressure by the regime.

But while a few hospitals shut down their gender-care facilities as a result and others tried to finesse the situation by “negotiating,” a number of institutions – starting with the medical practice QueerDoc in Seattle – went to court to “quash” (or shut down) the subpoena.

And they all won, because the subpoenas were, in fact, inappropriate (to put it nicely). In a couple of cases where the hospital didn’t take action, patients or family members of patients did, with the same results.

Which is to say: fighting back works.

Dithering, not so much. Continue reading “Just Say No”…

The Damage Keeps Growing

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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The New York Times recently reported that the National Weather Service is understaffed just as storm season is heating up. And while the Times doesn’t go into the details, anyone who was paying attention last year when the DOGE (pronounced “dodgy”) minions were running rampant through the government knows the absurd cuts they made are why the agency is short-staffed.

According to the article, the current director is saying that restructuring is good, but I don’t think anyone would want to begin their restructuring with massive cuts and loss of both experienced personnel and the new people they were mentoring.

Mind you, the Weather Service was one of our government’s great successes. Forecasting is so much more accurate now than it used to be. That’s in great part because the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which includes the Weather Service, put together world-class research.

NOAA in general is under attack from the regime, with the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, set for closure.

While this damage is already showing up in the forecasts for tornadoes and other storms and makes us all wonder what happens if this year turns out to be a big one for hurricanes, the odds are it’s going to leave us with less than adequate weather forecasting for years to come.

And it’s that ongoing effect – one that’s not limited to the Weather Service – that really bothers me.

Paul Krugman had an excellent piece this week on how the various cuts in social programs during the Reagan administration – a time that gets treated like history today though there are still quite a few of us who remember just how bad it was – have affected life expectancy in this country. Continue reading “The Damage Keeps Growing”…

Stop Interrupting Me!

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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I’m irritated at all the barriers I run into when I’m trying to read something online. This is important to me, because when it comes to getting information, I am first and foremost a reader.

While I do ask questions of people who know a lot about a subject – part of the work of being a reporter is learning to ask good questions – I often use that information as a jumping-off point to do more reading.

I used to listen to the radio news (meaning NPR) a lot when I lived alone, but now about the only thing I listen to are podcasts when I’m cooking.

And I’ve always detested television “news.” The last time I recall seriously watching television for breaking news was on September 11, 2001. Most of the time it’s too superficial to be worth watching.

Anyway, these days the internet is better for breaking news. In some cases, social media is better than more traditional sources, so long as you double check what it says.

While in the past I subscribed to print newspapers and while I still subscribe to a few print magazines, I get most of my news online these days. I subscribe to several digital publications, plus a variety of email newsletters, and I read many others piecemeal. I also read blogs, even if that is no longer considered cool.

Obviously I also read lots of books – both print and ebook – but the issues that brought on this rant have to do with the reading I do online.

First of all, every time I open The New York Times, which I do pay (way too much) for, they try to upsell me. They want me to add more readers on my subscription. They want me to subscribe to their premium features.

Ads pop up here and there. Obviously the print editions have ads as well, but I don’t recall seeing so many in print for things that are very close to being scams. (I just clicked on a story and a test that purports to tell you whether you have dementia popped up as an ad.)

I can mostly ignore the ones on news stories, but the online equivalent of what is called a “house ad” in the newspaper business – an ad promoting the publication – is often positioned over what I’m trying to read.

Further, I note that I have been subscribing to the Times for a long time, long enough to have originally had sports news as part of my subscription. Then they bought The Athletic. Whenever I forget and click on a sports story, they pop up to tell me I have to pay more if I want to get that.

That just reminds me that they reduced what I got for my subscription while increasing the cost. Continue reading “Stop Interrupting Me!”…

Does Money Solve Everything?

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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I’ve been procrastinating on my taxes, so I have money on the brain.

Most people say that having more money would solve most of their problems.

For some, that means the lifestyle of being able to throw money around – go to the best restaurants, buy a fancy car, live in an elegant house, travel to exclusive resorts worldwide.

Others just want enough so that they can pay their bills, see the doctor when they need to, and treat themselves from time to time without feeling pinched.

But regardless of how we define rich – whether it’s a lot of luxury items or just feeling comfortable that you can handle your needs – I think for most of us the true definition of “rich” is “never have to worry about money again.”

I know that’s my definition.

But according to Anand Giridharadas, who has been reviewing the Epstein files at length, people who are actually rich spend a lot of time worrying about money – particularly about how to make more of it and hold onto it over generations. He says emails around money are much more common in those files than ones documenting the abuse of children.

I was about to say Fitzgerald was right that the rich really are different from you and me, but maybe Hemingway’s (perhaps apocryphal) response on that point is also correct: “Yes, they have more money.” Continue reading “Does Money Solve Everything?”…

Doing the Work for the Sake of the Work

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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Elizabeth Spiers did a recent piece in The Nation on the anti-intellectualism of the broligarch crowd. It’s worth a read for its own sake, but she started it with a quote that got me to thinking about why people make art:

On Instagram, there’s an activist named Brian Patrick (@pano.dime) who has dedicated his account to “posting an insane thing an AI executive said every day in 2026.” I can’t stop thinking about his entry for Day 15, quoting the CEO of a company called Suno, Mikey Shulman, as he claimed that musicians hate the process of making music. “It’s not really enjoyable to make music now,” he said. “It takes a lot of time, a lot of practice, you need to get really good at an instrument or really good at a piece of production software. I think a majority of people don’t enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music.”

I mean, has this guy ever spent time around musicians? All they want to do is mess around with their instruments or their songs or jam with others. My own experience of music is mostly from marching band and church choir, places where you spend a lot of time in practice and don’t get paid.

And even the people who do it for a living also do it for fun. One of my favorite musicians, Joe Ely, passed recently, and almost every one of the many appreciations I’ve seen of his life and work talks about what a good time he had performing.

It’s obvious if you hang out with writers or artists or musicians or a lot of other people that many, many human beings love to do things that take a lot of work before you get good. And many of those things aren’t financially remunerative even if you get spectacularly good.

The only people using the predictive software labeled AI to do those things are people who want money more than they want to create. I don’t understand this myself. If you want to make money, go into finance. You’ll get a lot richer than 99 percent of artists and a hell of a lot richer than doing scam books.

I mean, take the guy who used a chatbot to write a paid book review for The New York Times. Getting paid to write book reviews for a prestigious publication is the gold standard for reviewers – who often work for free these days – and he didn’t even care about the gig enough to do the work. And got caught, since the predictive software plagierized the Guardian’s review of the book.

(The chatbot can’t read, so it didn’t read the book. I suspect the reviewer didn’t read the book either.)

The things I value most in my life are precisely those things that require the work. Continue reading “Doing the Work for the Sake of the Work”…

The Return of the Sex Test

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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The International Olympic Committee, in its infinite (lack of) wisdom, has decided that it will test all athletes competing in female categories to be sure they are “real” women. They’re going to use the presence of the SRY gene as a determining factor, even though the scientist who discovered it in 1990 says it is in no way determinative.

The headlines all say this will ban trans women from competing as women. However, as a practical matter, there are very few trans women competing at the world class level. The women it will actually affect are those who have what is called “DSD” – differences of sexual development.

These women were assigned female at birth (AFAB) and raised as girls. It was only when they began competing as athletes on a high level and ran into testing procedures that they discovered they had some hormonal or other differences that are less common in women.

If you want to get an in-depth understanding of the actual science (which doesn’t support this policy) and politics underlying what happened, I strongly recommend the reporting by Reo Eveleth. They had a excellent article in Coyote on this news right when it came out and also did a newsletter report. A couple of years back, they did a superb podcast on the topic called Tested.

I’m not surprised by this decision, but I am furious about it. Spitting mad furious. I mean, I was already mad about so many things you wouldn’t think I could get any angrier, but this sent me right over the edge.

Now I’m a cis woman, as far as I know. I’ve never participated in anything that required me to prove it, so all I know is that I was AFAB and have never had any reason to question that or any problem with it.

I’ve also been a serious martial artist since I was 30, which makes me something of an athlete, though I’m in no way a world class one and the only competition I ever did was a few tournaments back in my karate days.

So why do I care? I’m not trans and I’m not a world-class athlete, so even if I turned out to have “DSD,” it wouldn’t matter.

Well, first of all, these people have the nerve to define who gets to be a woman, but they don’t apply the same kind of test to men. If you’re a world-class athlete and you say you’re male, you’re accepted as male. Trans men could compete. Continue reading “The Return of the Sex Test”…

Living in the Ruins

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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My current morning book is Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins.

After reading the other morning, it occurred to me that we — in this case “we” means progressives who want a better country and are resisting the current destruction — keep trying to come up with fixes for our current messes that don’t change the system very much. So, for example, our ideas about health care are to imitate the European social programs and set up some kind of government-run single-payer system.

And while that’s not a bad idea as far as it goes and far more radical than anything that’s likely to happen anytime soon, I still have a feeling that we’re going to need something more than that, because our health care system is a colosal ruin.

Probably we have to start by recognizing how ruined things really are.

Tsing’s book uses the harvesting of matsutake mushrooms as a metaphor – or maybe a guideline – for dealing with with life in an area that has been ruined.

Matsutake only grow in the wild; they can’t be farmed. And they mostly grow in ruined forests, which is why there is a thriving business in them in the forests of Oregon, where the old growth forests were heavily logged. The timber companies replaced them with timber “plantations” of fir and lodgepole pine.

While this doesn’t make for the diverse and healthy forest that came before, it does provide an environment for the matsutake.

The matsutake are a delicacy in Japan, which provides a market.

There are many different kinds of pickers and also a variety of buyers who arrange the international sales. Many of the pickers are immigrants from various parts of Southeast Asia who were displaced by the U.S. war in Vietnam and other parts of the region, but even those come from different ethnic groups and have different approaches.

There are also immigrants from Latin America as well as some White native-born Americans, many of them war veterans who find holding regular jobs difficult.

But also – interestingly – there are Japanese Americans who approach this as a cultural activity, not a business. These are people descended from those who were interred in U.S. concentration camps during World War II. Their approach is quite different from that of the people doing it as a business.

The various immigrant cultures and their descendants are people figuring out how to survive after their worlds have been upended by war and economic crisis. Making a living finding mushrooms that grow in ruins makes sense in their world.

But for people like me, middle class though far from wealthy, the idea of surviving amidst the ruins that capitalism has wrought is scary. Still, when I look around me, I see those ruins everywhere.

I walk around Oakland, where ordinary houses sell for a million dollars (fancy ones for much more) and the rents for cafes and retailers are so exorbitant that far too many go out of business quickly. I see boarded up buildings everywhere alongside new apartment complexes — ugly ones, but still shiny.

Our city has been cut to pieces by highways running through it, tearing apart neighborhoods. Those highways and other badly planned projects add environmental ruin to the mix.

And of course, we have people living on the streets. Some have serious mental illness or addition problems, but a lot of them just don’t have the money for a place to live.

So much money and so much ruin, all at once.

It’s not just Oakland; I mention it because it’s where I live now and I know it. You can see it everywhere. Chris Brown’s book A Natural History of Empty Lots provides detailed looks at what creatures and plants are coming back in ruined urban landscapes, primarily in Austin, Texas.

Now I can see better ways of doing damn near everything and I would love to wave a magic wand and make those things happen. We have the tools, the resources, even the brainpower to make all this happen. Our problem has always been the will, particularly the political will.

But I think we’re only going to build this better world in the ruins of the capitalist state. Continue reading “Living in the Ruins”…