Sunday Sermon: From sewer to stovetop, it’s the little things.

Folks who’ve been reading this blog for a while might remember that when I moved into my current flat, its appliances were in less than stellar condition. It was almost two months before I had a fridge that was more than an insulated cabinet with a light, for example. The other noticeable problem was that only three out of four burners on the glass-top stove worked, and one of those three had a big crack across it. A couple months ago, the cracked burner died, and one of the two that remained would blow a fuse if we didn’t cut off power to the stove before turning the burner on or off.

I’m telling you all of this, because this week the property management company finally got around to getting us a new stovetop, and it’s frankly delightful to have a clean, functional stove.

It’s easy to under-estimate just how wonderful modern appliances are. In addition to your standard range of gas and electric ranges, I’ve cooked on wood stoves, a variety of camp stoves (one of which dumped boiling water on me – I don’t recommend it), and camp fires of various sizes. Through high school and college, I spent a lot of time camping in pretty much all conditions that occur in New England, including three summer jobs that had me doing so professionally. My preference for that has always been your standard camp fire (in high school I often had to light them without matches or lighters), but the reality is that there’s a lot of work involved in using and maintaining wood stoves. Not only that, but cooking with wood indoors generates enough air pollution to do real harm, over time.

Having a modern stove isn’t as important as having clean, running water, but I think it’s something that many of us are too inclined to take for granted.

It’s also something that’s worth considering, as it’s one of the uses of energy that a lot of people are going to have to change, if we ever get around to ending fossil fuel use. It’s my understanding that gas is the preferred stove type for people who love cooking, and I do understand why. It gives you the ability to easily control temperature, and switch from full heat to none at all almost instantly. Electric stoves take longer to reach the desired temperature, and to cool down. This means that you’ve got a dangerously hot surface just sitting there when you’re done with it, but it also means that if you want to reduce the heat of something you’re cooking, you have to remove it from the surface, like you would with a wood stove. That fact alone tends to mean that you need a bit more space to cook the same meal on an electric or wood stove than you do with gas.

That said, we have to stop extracting fossil gas. We should have stopped years ago. For most of us, that means the kinds of electric stoves I’ve been using for most of my adult life. For some people – and I’ve no idea how this would be decided – there is a renewable source of cooking gas that will always exist in reliable proportion to our population, plus livestock. That source, of course, is sewage. Biogas is not a new thing. The fact that every sewage treatment plant and garbage processing center in the world doesn’t have a biogas setup is yet another grim example of just how little our leaders care about climate change. The technology has been cheap and easy for so long that it was a key part of Mad Max: Beyond The Thunderdome, when I was was one year old:

There’s no question that the potential biogas supply, at least from human waste, is smaller than the fossil gas supply, but all of the carbon in biogas came from the atmosphere, and so at worst it’s carbon-neutral, and when it comes to replacing fossil fuels, reliability may count for almost as much as actual energy production. It means you can count on that amount of power being available, always in proportion to the population, just like you can count on the daily fluctuations in solar power generation.

I also think it’s worth mentioning that the amount of power that can be generated this way is significant.

Thames Water generated enough renewable energy from sewage in 2021 to cook 112 million Christmas turkeys.

The UK’s largest water company created almost 140 million cubic metres (m3) of biogas last year via its sewage treatment process. This was transformed into more than 300 million kWh of electricity.

Crossness sewage works in Greenwich was the biggest producer of renewable energy in 2021, churning out more than 18.5 million m3, enough to cook 15 million turkeys, while Mogden sewage works in Twickenham and Beckton in Newham generated approximately 18 million and 12 million m3 each.

“Creating our own clean, green energy is an important part of our sewage treatment process and we’re generating more and more each year,” commented Matt Gee, Thames Water’s energy & carbon strategy and reporting manager.

“Doing this allows us to power our sites with renewable, eco-friendly fuels, and as we continue to generate more, we want to export it to be used in our local communities.”

Eliot Whittington, director of the UK Corporate Leaders Group, of which Thames Water is a member, added: “As more and more of the world sets strong targets for climate change, it’s essential that action follows ambition.

“Thames Water’s investment in renewable energy is a great Christmas present to the UK’s climate targets and to the communities it operates in and makes a strong down payment on its long-term ambition to be net-zero by 2030.”

The company, which has already cut emissions by almost 70% since 1990, completed a biogas project at Chertsey sewage works in October last year. The £700,000 scheme is the latest in a roll-out which also covers Thames Water sites in London and the Thames Valley. Three-quarters of the firm’s boilers now run on biogas and it is aiming to convert all sites by the end of 2025.

Thames Water has been running biogas plants for a while now, and it’s been generating them a tidy profit, in addition to the ability to honestly say they’re doing something about climate change. They’re also a good example of how far we have to go when it comes to even the lowest-hanging fruit of climate action.

Half the reason global warming is so extremely dangerous to us is the speed at which it’s happening. If we’d stayed on the timeline Svante Arrhenius predicted around the beginning of the 20th century, we’d have hundreds of years before the planet’s temperature got to where it is today, and while we might not have been proactive about that change, we might well have had time to do it from generation to generation, and still avoid catastrophe.

I’m not saying that to frustrate you with what might have been, but to emphasize that reducing emissions really can buy us time, according to the same physics that tells us how great the danger is. There are a myriad of “small” things that can be done at local and regional levels that really will make a difference, and will likely improve people’s quality of life at the same time. Better insulation for homes, more efficient appliances, more people working from home, and yes – more sewage and other organic waste used to generate biogas – really can slow things down, and give us time to adapt, and to do other things that will also slow the change.

This problem is too big for any of us to tackle as individuals, but there are aspects of it that can absolutely be tackled at the local level, an that touch our lives pretty directly. That local action can inspire the same thing to happen elsewhere, and with things like the internet, one community can help others follow in their footsteps. We’ve never faced a crisis like this before, but we’ve also never had more capacity to coordinate with people on every part of this planet.

And we can keep on cooking with gas while we do it. In theory, anyway. I’m still using electric, but that’s more than fine, especially now that I have a shiny new stove!

If you like the content of this blog, please share it around. If you like the blog and you have the means, please consider joining my lovely patrons in paying for the work that goes into this. Due to my immigration status, I’m currently prohibited from conventional wage labor, so for the next couple years at least this is going to be my only source of income. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month (though more is obviously welcome), to help us make ends meet – every little bit counts!

Video: The ongoing harm of French colonialism in Africa

While it could be argued that the colonial era is over, there is zero question that the power dynamics, harm, and injustices of colonialism continue around the world to this day. Occasionally, something will happen that draws attention to this fact – the U.S. government brutalizing Native American people for standing in the way of oil profits, for example. These sensational moments are a very real part of colonialism’s ongoing violence, but I think it’s fair to say that they’re a small portion of the overall damage being done. It’s the sort of subject that can only really be tackled in pieces, simply because of how much of humanity is still dealing with the damage done by the colonial empires. For various reasons, I think I tend to focus on the Americas, but the Gravel Institute has put together a great video on the legacy of French imperialism in Africa:

Weep for Cassandra if you must, but heed her warnings, for humanity’s sake

It’s April of 2022. We’ve had a couple years of disruption, primarily caused by the collision of late capitalism and SARS-CoV-2, which itself followed a couple years of unrest in the United States, and the growing realization that fascism was still a real threat. And in the background of all of this, we’ve had a steady march of disasters fueled by global warming, and scientific reports quantifying exactly how screwed we are.

Small wonder, then, that superstition seems to be on the rise. Every headline about black goo in a sarcophagus, or climate change revealing ancient artifacts was met with a lot of joking-not-joking about curses, or Pandora’s Box.

For myself, I have to wonder if some early climate scientist broke an indecent agreement with Apollo, so that all future climate scientists would be cursed to speak the truth about the growing threat of climate change, and to be disbelieved or dismissed by everyone with the power to do anything about it. Worse, an entire industry has formed around attacking and discrediting climate scientists. If you want to get a taste of that frustration, you can check out things like The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars, by Michael E. Mann.

I once heard someone say that the more you learn about nuclear power, the less it scares you, but the more you learn about climate change, the more it scares you. Imagine, then, the life of someone whose full time job is monitoring this unfolding catastrophe, and reporting on it to what often seems like an indifferent world.

The reality, of course, is that most of humanity is not indifferent. Most of us care very much about what’s happening, we just don’t currently have the power to change anything. That’s something we should be working on, but in the meantime, at least part of our efforts do need to go towards convincing the ruling class to at least stop accelerating towards the proverbial cliff. Climate scientists have been making that case for decades now, and it has been a thankless task.

Among the many attacks levied against them, one that always irked me especially was the claim that climate scientists were “getting political” by describing the implications of their research, and by urging action. It is so obviously insincere, and yet it has hung around. I think part of its longevity is the fact that it does double duty. It casts doubt on the science, and it communicates to the audience that “being political” is an inherently bad thing. That’s dangerous, of course, because if we’re going to have any hope of a better world, we must get political , and at a scale the world has never seen before.

I am nowhere close to being alone in making the Cassandra comparison, and unfortunately it seems to be just as unpleasant as you’d think. Peter Kalmus, a climate scientist, published this letter in association with a protest carried out by him and his colleagues:

I’m a climate scientist and a desperate father. How can I plead any harder? What will it take? What can my colleagues and I do to stop this catastrophe unfolding now all around us with such excruciating clarity?

On Wednesday, I risked arrest by locking myself to an entrance to the JP Morgan Chase building in downtown Los Angeles with colleagues and supporters. Our action in LA is part of an international campaign organized by a loosely knit group of concerned scientists called Scientist Rebellion, involving more than 1,200 scientists in 26 countries and supported by local climate groups. Our day of action follows the IPCC Working Group 3 report released Monday, which details the harrowing gap between where society is heading and where we need to go. Our movement is growing fast.

We chose JP Morgan Chase because out of all the investment banks in the world, JP Morgan Chase funds the most new fossil fuel projects. As the new IPCC report explains, emissions from current and planned fossil energy infrastructure are already more than twice the amount that would push the planet over 1.5°C of global heating, a level of heating that will bring much more intense heat, fire, storms, flooding, and drought than the present 1.2°C.

Even limiting heating to below 2°C, a level of heating that in my opinion could threaten civilization as we know it, would require emissions to peak before 2025. As UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said in the press conference on Monday: “Investing in new fossil fuel infrastructure is moral and economic madness.” And yet, this is precisely what President Biden, most other world leaders, and major banks are doing. It’s no exaggeration to say that Chase and other banks are contributing to murder and neocide through their fossil fuel finance.

Earth breakdown is much worse than most people realize. The science indicates that as fossil fuels continue to heat our planet, everything we love is at risk. For me, one of the most horrific aspects of all this is the juxtaposition of present-day and near-future climate disasters with the “business as usual” occurring all around me. It’s so surreal that I often find myself reviewing the science to make sure it’s really happening, a sort of scientific nightmare arm-pinch. Yes, it’s really happening.
If everyone could see what I see coming, society would switch into climate emergency mode and end fossil fuels in just a few years.

I hate being the Cassandra. I’d rather just be with my family and do science. But I feel morally compelled to sound the alarm. By the time I switched from astrophysics into Earth science in 2012, I’d realized that facts alone were not persuading world leaders to take action. So I explored other ways to create social change, all the while becoming increasingly concerned. I joined Citizens’ Climate Lobby. I reduced my own emissions by 90% and wrote a book about how this turned out to be satisfying, fun, and connecting. I gave up flying, started a website to help encourage others, and organized colleagues to pressure the American Geophysical Union to reduce academic flying. I helped organize FridaysForFuture in the US. I co-founded a popular climate app and started the first ad agency for the Earth. I spoke at climate rallies, city council meetings, and local libraries and churches. I wrote article after article, open letter after open letter. I gave hundreds of interviews, always with authenticity, solid facts, and an openness to showing vulnerability. I’ve encouraged and supported countless climate activists and young people behind the scenes. And this was all on my personal time and at no small risk to my scientific career.

Nothing has worked. It’s now the eleventh hour and I feel terrified for my kids, and terrified for humanity. I feel deep grief over the loss of forests and corals and diminishing biodiversity. But I’ll keep fighting as hard as I can for this Earth, no matter how bad it gets, because it can always get worse. And it will continue to get worse until we end the fossil fuel industry and the exponential quest for ever more profit at the expense of everything else. There is no way to fool physics.

Martin Luther King Jr said, “He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.” Out of necessity, and after exhaustive efforts, I’ve joined the ranks of those who selflessly risk their freedom and put their bodies on the line for the Earth, despite ridicule from the ignorant and punishment from a colonizing legal system designed to protect the planet-killing interests of the rich. It’s time we all join them. The feeling of solidarity is a wonderful balm.

As for the climate scientists? We’ve been trying to tell you this whole time.

This was one part of a multinational protest by over 1,000 climate scientists, aimed specifically at the big banks that are funding – and profiting from – our destruction. The notion that scientists ought to be non-political has always been a lie that could only ever benefit the powerful. In a world that seems to only value the sensational, we need acts of civil disobedience like this, and we need to build the capacity to wield collective power for the collective good. These scientists are in the right when they aim for the heart of our capitalist system, and while I really, really want to be wrong about this, I have little hope that our corporate overlords will suddenly decide to do the right thing.

One thing I think we should be doing, beyond organizing and protesting, is finding ways to bring up climate change with politicians and their representatives. Not just climate change, but the ways in which our system – working as it was designed – is making it profitable to turn this planet into a sweltering hellscape. Make it impossible for them to ignore, and when they respond with talking points, challenge those, and the ones that come after them. Individually, we’re limited in how much time and energy we can spend on this. Anyone with a sense of perspective realizes that the mightiest effort of one person is a drop in the bucket, compared to the size of the problem. If we can get enough of us moving in the same direction, those drops can become a relentless storm, and if we can’t force our rulers to at least go with the flow, then maybe we can wash them away.

Thanks to StevoR for requesting the topic.

If you like the content of this blog, please share it around. If you like the blog and you have the means, please consider joining my lovely patrons in paying for the work that goes into this. Due to my immigration status, I’m currently prohibited from conventional wage labor, so for the next couple years at least this is going to be my only source of income. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month (though more is obviously welcome), to help us make ends meet – every little bit counts!

Tegan Tuesday: Etsy sellers are going on strike

Article edited April 15, 2022

Next week, from April 11th through the 18th, there is a seller strike on Etsy. After years of increasingly hostile policies, the new seller fee increase is a step too far. There have been a number of planned strikes over the years, but this is the first one I’ve seen that has had any real traction. Many sellers will be putting their shops on Vacation Mode, as this makes it so that sales cannot be processed, and the strikers request that people not attempt to purchase goods during that time.

For those not familiar, Etsy is a microtransaction website, much like eBay, only it does not offer the bidding set-up, and it has traditionally privileged homemade or vintage objects. Anyone who has ever made the foolish mistake of knitting in public has had at least one person tell them that they should sell their wares on Etsy. Some of those lovely strangers will get quite cranky at the lack of enthusiasm at being voluntold to monetize their hobby. Because of my ability to find easier work elsewhere, I have never been an Etsy seller. But I have been a shopper! I bought my silver and my china on Etsy, I’ve bought furs, and I’ve bought any number of sewing patterns and books. Heck, Abe and I got our wedding rings from a blacksmith’s Etsy shop — I have been a longtime Etsy customer. I haven’t bought much in years, however, for a number of reasons. Initially, as a consumer, it seemed like it was difficult to find anything. I can’t even particularly put my finger on anything specific, but about five years ago I felt that things that I should have easily found were rare, or shops that I used to love were gone. It was confusing, but ultimately didn’t impact my life, so I ignored it, and just bought less.

It turns out there there were a number of policies and decisions happening “under the hood” that were actively making it difficult for sellers to make a living. The first large decision that shaped all the rest was of course becoming publicly traded. As of April 16, 2015, Etsy, Inc (NASDAQ: ETSY) has been a publicly traded company and thus has to answer to its shareholders and drive profit up. Ever expanding upwards! And then began the price gouging and offloading of financial burden to sellers. To quote Denise Hendrick of Romantic Recollections:

In the last couple years they have raised rates and added new, mandatory fees. 15% fees on orders from ads they run and that we cannot turn off. 5% on the amount buyers pay for shipping. They strongly pressure sellers to offer free shipping and run sales. It all adds up fast. They added programs like “star seller” that add to our workload and are hard to meet, but if we don’t hit that goal we’re not listed as highly. At the same time, more and more sellers are selling mass produced junk.”

Last year (or the year before — time has no meaning since Covid) Etsy also strong-armed most sellers into offering “free” shipping. When sellers rightfully asked how that would work, Etsy’s official stance was to artificially inflate your prices to hide the shipping costs. This was also during a push to dodge any responsibility for the many, many, many shipping issues during the pandemic, and allow buyers to recoup their costs with no fault and sellers to have to eat said costs. Now the seller is out the product and the income. This fee structure is so hostile to sellers and many have either left Etsy, or use Etsy only as a way for people to find their personal website. Taylor of Dames a la Mode only lists stock pieces on Etsy and offers limited runs or customizable options on her personal site, as that is her primary selling space. In her statement of intent to strike she says:

Etsy has changed dramatically over the years, and the fee increases are endless. That’s why my stuff on Etsy costs more than my website – their fees are so high! And the worst thing is they force you to pay to promote your items outside of Etsy (I truly, truly hate this but you can’t opt out… infuriation!)

There have been so many new fees, and increased fees, and seller-hostile policies that many sellers have felt their stores are experiencing death by a thousand cuts. Many sellers feel that it’s only a matter of time before their profits do not exceed the overhead at Etsy. The reason for the strike is that with record-breaking profits from last year, Etsy is implementing a 30% seller fee increase on all sales. This is an absolutely ridiculous number. The fact that all sellers received a yearly newsletter congratulating Etsy and thanking their hard work for said profit, only to have this fee thrown in their faces is… very corporate America.

One of the most faithful voices I have heard concerning the many issues plaguing Etsy sellers is that of Sultry Vintage. She closed the Vintage end of her Etsy shop last year due to an ever-increasing hedge of fees with policies encouraging sales and slashing prices. Her recent statement about supporting the strikers went out today and I think sums up the general feeling well.

Storms a brewing. Etsy recently sent out a newsletter congratulating everyone on their record profits. They then shared the news that they’d be hiking fees. Because Etsy is a publicly traded company with a backwards minded CEO, they profit share with investors and squeeze sellers for more to hand over to shareholders.

Sellers are the sole reason Etsy exists at all.

I many not make my entire living off Etsy any longer – Etsy and its hot garbage policies since going public being a contributing factor to that – but I do solidly stand with tens of thousands of independent small businesses who do. Who built Etsy, and who are being taken to the cleaners every time their hard work pays off.

I’m asking three things. One, if you’ve ever said you support small business – mean it. Right now, refuse to shop on Etsy for the week of the 11th-18th. Shop directly with sellers if you need something or plan ahead. Two, spread the word. It’s a small ask with massive, rippling effects. Three, if you can strike for any amount of time, do. Put the message in your vacation banner as to why you’re striking. Etsy has a policy of not allowing you to inform customers that they can shop with you off etsy (hilarious), so let them know now where to find you for that week and that is a crucial moment for support and shopping alternatively, off etsy.

Etsy has decided sellers are puppets meant only to reap them profits. It’s time the corporate structure acknowledge that without its sellers, Etsy ceases to exist, and honor the labor sellers put in that makes them boatloads of money while small businesses drown.

Please spread the word and go directly to the organizers of this movement for more info @etsy.strike

It makes sense that with the absolute nightmare situation that is labor right now, strikes and unions are forming everywhere. The Etsy strike is yet another one, and I think the time is certainly ripe for this strike in particular, and labor rights in general.

Of course there is a downside. There’s always a downside. Sellers who are barely breaking even can’t afford to strike. Lauren of Wearing History is only striking on the first day, for example. She is financially unable to close for a whole week, and doesn’t have the wherewithal to maintain a site that can reach her international customer base the way Etsy can. I have thankfully seen nothing but kindness and respect to those sellers who say they are unable to strike for financial reasons. I hope that continues as we get closer to the strike, especially as the biggest impediment to strike support is wanting to also support Ukrainian sellers. Elizabeth-Iryna of Bygone Memorabilia, The Boudoir Key, and Marie Theresa and Lumieres has been one of the most vocal Ukrainian makers and offered a clear statement in opposition:

Some of you sent me the “Sellers Ask Customers to Boycott Etsy” news due to increasing fees.

Thank you for thinking of me. 🙂 Unfortunately, selling completely outside of Etsy is not possible for me at the moment. Ukrainian users of Paypal can’t use it for business. Etsy didn’t cancel any fees for Ukrainian shops. When I can, I will open my website. I also use the help of intermediary for a few, because Paypal is still unavailable for Ukrainian business.

I cannot boycott Etsy because selling e-patterns on there is my one and only source of income at the moment. Same for other Ukrainians.

Yes, Etsy is making money on us. But it helps us live, too.

And therein lies the quandary: Ukrainian makers who are trapped in Ukraine or those who are refugees in other countries have very few options for income right now, and digital resources on Etsy have been a staple. Much like the movement to rent Ukrainian AirBnBs to send funds to Ukrainians, many people have sent financial support through Etsy purchases. Strikes are always difficult and often hurt those with the most to lose. I wish the strike well, and I hope that it doesn’t severely impact those sellers relying solely on Etsy for their daily needs. I’m unfortunately pessimistic enough to suspect that it will have little-to-no impact on the decision-makers at Etsy, and Etsy will continue to function as the saying goes: I know it’s crooked, but it’s the only game in town.

Abe here – if you like the content of this blog, please share it around. If you like the blog and you have the means, please consider joining my lovely patrons in paying for the work that goes into this. Due to my immigration status, I’m currently prohibited from conventional wage labor, so for the next couple years at least this is going to be my only source of income. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month (though more is obviously welcome), to help us make ends meet – every little bit counts!

Action or despair? What’s the result of “climate deadline” rhetoric?

So I’m going to read the new IPCC report, and see if I have more in-depth commentary on it, but I wanted to say a couple words about the rhetoric surrounding the report, and a strategy I think basically anyone making six figures or more should consider.

While I get why it’s being pushed, the “now or never” rhetoric worries me for a couple reasons. The first is just that I’m worried it will push people to give up, since “now” clearly isn’t happening. The second is that I feel like it’s a continuation of the same obsession with the short term and with urgent crises that has gotten us to this point.

I have no evidence to back this up, but I think that if I was involved in climate messaging, I’d probably start making preparations for the world we seem to be creating, and simply talking about them in public on a regular basis. Store food against crop failures, and mention that it probably won’t be enough, if things keep warming. Start building water storage infrastructure, with rationing rules about how that emergency supply is to be used (very little for hygiene, for example). Put around plans to require new hotel construction (among other kinds of facilities) to double as emergency shelters with the capacity to keep indoor air at livable temperatures when it’s 45°C/113°F or higher, even if there’s a blackout. Put around draft regulations requiring new power plants to be able to operate safely under extreme heat wave conditions, because otherwise people will die.

If anyone with political or economic power happens to be reading this, and you actually care about climate change, the most powerful messaging you could probably do is to use the resources you have now to start making preparations for a much hotter world. You can be clear that you’re hoping this won’t be needed right away, but also paint a picture, with references to relevant research, of how our lives are going to change in the coming decades. Speeches will not work to convince people at this point – actions might have a shot.

And if people don’t like what your actions say about the future, then remind them that we know what we have to do to make that future better, we’re just not doing it.

I don’t know if this will be easier for politicians to do than directly tackling the fossil fuel industry right now, but I feel like it’s a powerful message to tell people that since corrupt monsters like Manchin (and many others) are preventing us from doing anything to slow or stop climate change, then it’s their duty to do what they can to help their constituents or communities survive.

Couple rhetoric with action wherever possible, and make it clear what path is being chosen for us with the status quo. I have a feeling that as things get worse, the political cost of opposing climate change adaptation measures will increase. It’s easy to abstract and confuse the causes of climate change, but when it comes to living with the effects, I think you’ll have a hard time convincing people that they don’t need to make any changes to survive.

It feels like we’re still stuck in the “capitalist realism” trap, where nobody seems to be able to conceive of any end to capitalism that isn’t also the end of the world. We know that technology and planning can help us survive more hostile conditions, but it really feels like the collective view is that if we can’t stop climate change from getting really bad, then we might as well just give up and die. It’s not just a bad strategy, it’s also frankly pathetic from a species with ambitions to live on other planets.

I don’t want to live in a world that’s a couple degrees hotter, but I don’t want to live under capitalism either, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to give up on my life and my species because a few rich assholes can’t be bothered to do the bare minimum for future generations. When we miss climate deadlines, that does mean certain changes are inevitable. It does not mean that if we don’t take action now, taking action a little later will be pointless – it’ll just be harder.

If you like the content of this blog, please share it around. If you like the blog and you have the means, please consider joining my lovely patrons in paying for the work that goes into this. Due to my immigration status, I’m currently prohibited from conventional wage labor, so for the next couple years at least this is going to be my only source of income. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month (though more is obviously welcome), to help us make ends meet – every little bit counts!

Video: Leaked Applebee’s Email Vindicates Karl Marx

There are a number of people on the left who put maybe a little too much stock in “reading theory” as an essential part of being a good leftist. I think they have a bit of a point. In all fields, theory helps us make sense of what we’re seeing, and gives us lenses through which to consider new information. That said, there’s a lot of stuff in “theory” that can be pretty well reasoned out by pretty much anyone. In this case, a leaked email points to what Marx described as the “reserve army of labor” – an under-class that is always in a state of economic desperation, so that there’s always someone willing to take starvation wages, because it’s all they can get. In this case, it’s management celebrating that poverty by talking about how the increase in gas prices will mean more people scrabbling for any job they can get, which means management can start paying people less. I’m willing to bet these people sleep fine at night, and that’s the kind of person our system empowers.

If you want a more in-depth look, I recommend this discussion clipped from the Left Reckoning podcast:

 

The rich and powerful don’t live in reality. That’s both terrifying, and cause for hope

Ok, so when I said I was “finishing up” my sanctions piece, I meant I was continuing to work on it and will have it done very soon. Self-imposed deadlines don’t always make me get things done when I want to, but they do at least move the work along. As with previous such things, I hope to have it out soon, so I can start taking way too long to finish my Outer Worlds post.

The fact that I’ve mostly maintained a solitary life, due to being a self-employed writer, means that the surreal passage of time many of us felt during lockdown has continued unabated. I’m reasonably sure I’ve been in Ireland for a year, but I could be off by a decade or two in either direction. B’fhéidir go raibh mé amú ag sióga.

That said, it also feels like news is moving rapidly. When we first decided to move to this side of the Atlantic, I have to admit that Putin was one of our bigger short-term worries, and while the war has had little affect on us beyond the emotional, I would have preferred to look back and think I was silly for worrying. I continue to hope for a swift end to the war, with as little bloodshed and as little of a shift towards authoritarianism as possible. As with so much else, it feels like there’s not much I can do beyond that.

I did, however, want to share this thread I came across. I can’t speak to the accuracy of this analysis, but it feels right to me. That should probably make me more suspicious of it, but I’m not seeing much of a hole in the reasoning:

The thread is pretty long, and I’ll include another couple bits of it, but this line of argument spoke to me not because I like playing strategy games like the Civ series to unwind, but because I’ve noticed this… video game logic, for lack of a better term, before. It has struck me a few times that libertarians seem to think reality is like an open-world roleplaying game. These can be single-player or multi-player, but one pretty consistent theme is endlessly replenishing natural resources. I think it first occurred to me while I was playing Witcher 3 a few years ago, and needed a little more money, so I just went out into the woods, found some monsters to kill, and hey presto, I’ve got what I need!

But even leaving out the way the game makes these slow and laborious activities quick and easy, there’s the fact that if you pluck an herb, it will have regrown within a couple days, and that continues year-round, forever. In a game world like that, libertarianism actually almost makes sense. There’s a direct correlation between time invested and rewards gained, and it’s easy to “make a living”, even on the hardest difficulty. The same is true of pretty much all of these games – they all come with an endlessly and rapidly replenished commons, so no matter how bad things get, if you’re alive, you can go from having nothing at all, to being pretty rich ten times out of ten. Not only that, but everyone starts out in the same place. It really is a level playing field. While I was thinking about writing a post about this, back in 2020, Thought Slime beat me to it, with a video focused on Minecraft:

When I was a kid, I thought adults had it all figured out. I think that’s a pretty common experience, and it probably makes for a far more comfortable childhood than the alternative. I have no shame at having had that misconception. I lost it as I grew older, and it wasn’t something I particularly needed to be taught. What does cause me a little shame is how long I held on to the belief that politicians and pundits have any more of a clue what they’re doing than anyone else. Certainly, some of them have expertise in areas like law that most of us lack. Overall I think division of labor is a good thing. The problem is the message that competence in law (or “business”) is an indicator of competence in governance. Again, it’s a claim I believed for a time, but eventually I realized that it wasn’t a coincidence that most of our leaders seemed so incompetent, or so ignorant. For a lot of them, they’re so detached from reality, that their actual lives probably do feel pretty similar to being the main character of a video game.

And I have to say that that is both a clarifying and terrifying realization. In a lot of ways, we are at the mercy of immensely powerful children who never fully grew up, and who don’t really see us as much more than the background and programming for their game.

A quick glance at history will show the horrors wrought by this arrangement of power, but I also think provides us with very real grounds for hope. People who think they’re in a video game are far less likely to be prepared for the non-player characters in that game to organize and cut off access to goods and services. They’re utterly dependent on most people going along with how they want the world to work, and they run into problems when reality doesn’t go along with their plans.

If you like the content of this blog, please share it around. If you like the blog and you have the means, please consider joining my lovely patrons in paying for the work that goes into this. Due to my immigration status, I’m currently prohibited from conventional wage labor, so for the next couple years at least this is going to be my only source of income. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month (though more is obviously welcome), to help us make ends meet – every little bit counts!

Some More News: Unions and Strikes are Good, and Bosses are Bad.

The things I’ve been working on today aren’t ready, so instead, here’s Cody’s Showdy to talk about unions and strikes. There’s some useful stuff in here, and if you consider what caused the strikes discussed, it’s a good illustration of the kinds of people our current system empowers.

Left-wing labor organizing is the only reason we’re not all stuck accepting Amazon gift cards instead of wages, and the only thing standing between us and a slide into a worse version of serfdom in service to the whims of people who would be happy to burn the poor for fuel if it made them more money than burning oil.

 

Tegan Tuesday: Art, Disability, and “Real Jobs”

One of the most common themes of this blog is an unending rage against the way our society devalues humanity. Usually, this is focused on the fairly direct destruction of life for profit. Unfortunately, that’s not where it ends. Both Abe and I have been involved in education for a long time, and we’ve both been frustrated by the way the education system — and by extension, society — treats art as a luxury. As frustrating as that is, it gets worse when you enter the workforce. Art, in all its forms, has always been vitally important to every human society we have ever known about. Those societies we remember best and know the most about, tend to be the ones that invested some of their excess, when they had it, into art and culture. But just as human life must be sacrificed for profit, so to must human enjoyment, because funding art for its own sake will not make anyone rich. Artists must either already have money, or scrabble to find the time and energy to do that work, on top of doing work for the benefit of others to make ends meet.

I am an artist. Therefore, I have had a lot of jobs. I have worked in sit-down restaurants, in commercial food prep, at farmer’s markets, in fast food and ice cream scooping; I have worked in translation and real estate; I have worked in gas stations, and theatres, and schools K-12 through graduate programs; I have answered phones and scrubbed toilets; I have worked in clients’ homes, in my home, in basements, in parks, and in churches. I have been working constantly for the past 18 years, and there are very few areas of employment that I have not had some experience. I work and work and have almost always been poor, because I have never lived in places that were cheap while working a job that paid enough to build savings. Amusingly, I also made too much to merit assistance, as Abe and I found out when we initially became a single-income household — in one of the most expensive cities in the US — and we were eligible for $15 of food stamps per month. In all of these jobs, my problems with it were rarely my coworkers, and even-more-rarely the clients. I’m an extreme extrovert with ADHD — I like how a customer-facing role is wildly different from day to day and even the most bizarre (non-violent) encounter with the general public just makes for a great story, and doesn’t actually impact my life significantly. No, usually my problems lie squarely with my bosses or the company higher ups.

I’ve had a boss who drunktexted my coworkers and installed spyware on our computers. I’ve had multiple bosses who would watch the security feeds and call to ask questions about what they were watching. I’ve had bosses who preferred to hire 16-year-olds because unexperienced workers don’t notice the many, many, labor violations employees are required to perform. I’ve been fired by text and I’ve been replaced by someone I trained without the notice of being demoted or fired. On one memorable occasion, I had an argument with a boss about simple arithmetic. With all of these shining beacons of industry as my leaders, small wonder that some of my favorite employment has been self-employed.

This goes beyond simple preference, as well. If one person is drained enough by their work that they can’t make themselves do extra on the side, another may have problems – like neurological disorders or physical disability, that mean they hit that point where they can’t work more faster, depending on working conditions. For a non-insignificant portion of the population, self-employment has often been the only employment. Writer Siobhan Ball recently headed a twitter thread discussing the intersection of “real jobs” and disabled lives.

The discussion is filled with artists and freelancers of all types: writers, musicians, visual artists, sex workers. Many of the “real jobs” come with requirements that are physically, mentally, or legally not possible for large swathes of the population. I think back to one of my theatre jobs, which was impossible for someone with mobility issues. Even if I was able to get into the theatre next door to make one of their employees run the service lift for me for every shift, I still would not have been able to use the bathroom, as there were two steps from the floor up into the stall. Many jobs also have high mental strain. Anyone who has ever worked retail or even observed the astounding lack of humanity that shoppers unleash upon the staff can picture how those types of service jobs have an emotional (and often physical) toll upon the employees. Call center employees are worse-off still than retail for a mental and emotional load. The legal restrictions on disabled folks is even shittier. I know in the US there are caps on the amount that someone on disability can have in savings (and it’s small, it’s something like $1000) and restrictions on how many hours they are allowed to work or how much money they can make in those hours. This video by Jessica Kellgren-Fozard, a disability activist, does a decent overview of some of those issues. But running an Etsy merch shop, or doing cam work, or writing and editing freelance are all jobs that have less oversight, work around a person’s schedule and needs, and are just flexible in all the ways that life can require.

We need people to do these jobs! There’s no question that they provide great value to all of our lives. As discussed at the beginning, art is an important part of what we are. When we had to cope with isolation during lockdowns, we turned to art. We read more, we watched more movies, we listened to more music, we watched more YouTube, and yes, more people joined OnlyFans too. Art gives us connection with other people, and that was at a premium during the past few years of pandemic. But even is it uses the work of artists, of freelancers, of those casually employed in non-“real” jobs, society as a whole hasn’t bothered to appreciate this work anymore than it has what was recently called “essential” work. If we as a society don’t value artists, and don’t value disabled people, how much worse is the disabled artist?

I’m just as guilty as the next person — I see post after post on social media of people who are disabled, or neurodivergent, or queer, or just poor, and who are raising funds by selling art and I have a gut reaction to wonder why they can’t just “get a real job”. I am not sure if there’s the possibility to change our acceptance of this labor as valid without also decoupling a person’s worth in our society from their ability to work. It seems like a massive undertaking, but it’s a task that needs doing. For now, it’s a good day to remind ourselves: each person has value just by being themselves and deserves to live their life without “earning” that value through an approved from of labor.

Abe here – f you like the content of this blog, please share it around. If you like the blog and you have the means, please consider joining my lovely patrons in paying for the work that goes into this. Due to my immigration status, I’m currently prohibited from conventional wage labor, so for the next couple years at least this is going to be my only source of income. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month (though more is obviously welcome), to help us make ends meet – every little bit counts!

Video: America’s role in the 1971 genocide in Bangladesh

As the invasion of Ukraine continues, some folks on left have been trying to use the media attention on that war, to draw attention to other atrocities going on, particularly the U.S.-backed genocidal war Saudi Arabia is waging on Yemen. In that spirit, I think it’s worth checking out this video from the Gravel Institute, about the 1971 Bangladesh genocide. This was one of many genocides during the Cold War that happened with American support. So many, that while I’ve learned about many, I knew virtually nothing about this one. This happened under Nixon, but this kind of thing is a major part of both Democratic and Republican foreign policy, right along with things like coups, assassinations, CIA black sites, and so on. If we ever want to see a more just, peaceful, and sustainable world, we’re going to need to find a way to end this kind of imperialist activity, and to do that, we have to understand it.

Content warning: Discussion of violence, sexual assault, and racism