Category: Uncategorized

thisiseverydayracism:

Even if the world celebrates a Paris climate deal on Dec. 11, the process will still have to be regarded as a failure. Let me explain why.

The basic reason is that the unequal distribution of carbon emissions is not even on its agenda. The historical responsibility of the West is not on the table, nor is a method of national carbon accounting that looks at how the emissions a country consumes rather than produces. Instead, what is on the table are expanded and new mechanisms that will allow the rich, Western countries to outsource their emission cuts so they can paint themselves green.

When the figures are in, 2015 is likely to be the warmest year on record, and we’ve just reached one-degree Celsius temperature rise since the industrial revolution, halfway to the two-degree Celsius widely agreed to be the upper safe limit of global warming. It’s the fastest surface temperature increase in the world’s known geological history. We are now entering “uncharted territory.”

The dangers of global warming have been known—even to oil company executives—since at least the early 1980s. Yet, despite 25 years of the United Nations-led climate talks, the world is burning more fossil fuels than ever.

This is not simply the fault of big emerging economies such as China, India, or Brazil. Instead, what we are dealing with is the fundamental failure of neoliberal capitalism, the world’s dominant economic system, to confront its hunger for exponential growth that is only made possible by the unique energy density of fossil fuels such as coal, oil and gas.

Historical responsibility

A glance at global history reveals how closely energy is linked to economic growth. The Netherlands was the first country to get a taste for exponential industrial growth back in the 16th and 17th centuries—and the Dutch empire was built on the availability of cheap domestic peat as well as timber from Norwegian and Baltic forests.

One reason the British took over the Netherlands’ imperial leadership was its vast reserves of cheap coal, which started to be burned at the end of the 18th century, exponentially growing in the 19th century. Then came oil and gas, which helped make the US the imperial master from the early 20th century onwards.

So, there are more than 300 years of massive fossil fuel burning by the so-called West to account for. And while this historical responsibility still played a significant role at Kyoto in 1997—resulting in emissions cuts that were only legally binding for industrialised countries—it has gradually been pushed into the background.

Now in Paris it seems almost forgotten. But the fact that about 80% of historical carbon emissions have to be attributed to the developed countries cannot simply be wished away.

The rapid rise of emissions, particularly in China and India, is often cited as the reason for why these rapidly industrialising countries now also have to curb their emissions. I’m not saying that they shouldn’t. Both countries clearly have their own imperial ambitions, which they hope to achieve by stimulating massive industrial expansion.

But let’s bear in mind that India’s carbon emissions per capita are still 10 times lower than those of the US. And China’s rapidly rising emissions are to a great extent driven by export-driven industries, producing consumer goods for the West.

Creative carbon accounting

In fact, if a consumption-based approach to carbon accounting is taken, the UK’s national carbon emissions would be twice as high as officially reported. This is also true for most Western European countries and the US, which have experienced increasing rates of deindustrialisation over the past two decades with not only jobs but also carbon emissions being offshored to developing countries. In return, the West is receiving cheap consumer goods without recognising the responsibility for the embedded carbon emissions that come with them. A clear form of carbon colonialism.

Of course, some of the exponential growth in carbon emissions by India and China is also due to increases in homegrown consumption. China apparently now has the largest middle class in the world. However, if we take a consumption-based view, then even China’s emissions per capita will not reach the US’s current rate for a long time, and India’s lag further behind.

Yet, rich countries continue to be eager to outsource their responsibilities. Carbon offsetting will see an unprecedented growth in the coming years. Countries such as Norway and Switzerland will continue to strike bilateral deals with poor nations desperate for cash. Emissions trading systems (ETS) will allow maximum flexibility for companies to offset their emissions.

These are all mechanisms designed to cement the status quo. The European Union ETS has not made a significant impact on the trading bloc’s carbon emissions since its inception in 2005, allowing Shell’s CEO Ben Van Beurden to insist even in 2015 that: “The reality of demand growth is such that fossil fuels will be needed for decades to come.”

Nothing significant has changed since Rio 1992 or Kyoto 1997. Paris 2015 will be no different. The talking will continue until we realise climate change is a failure of a system, which—on the back of fossil fuel—is geared towards exponential economic growth. Nobody who sits at the negotiation table in Paris has the mandate nor inclination to ask fundamental, systemic questions of the logic of the dominant economic system and the way we consume the resources of this planet.

Source: https://qz.com/562417/stop-blaming-india-and-china-for-the-wests-300-years-of-destroying-the-environment/

The Paris Climate Accord was economic and climate colonialism and it deserves to go to hell. 

The fucking West has for centuries fueled global warming by industrializing, all the while enslaving people of color in their own lands, and now they want people of color to curb their own development to pay for the West’s sins? FUCK RIGHT OFF. 

If the West wants developing countries to curb their emissions then it needs to compensate in trillions of dollars to account for the economic growth lost in achieving those reductions. That’s economic and climate justice. 

[To the crackers who’ll no doubt show up in our inbox complaining about this: No. This is not an endorsement of the US pulling out of the Paris Agreement. This is saying that the US should be one of the core countries that should be bound by an emissions-curbing agreement.]

communism-sans-communists:

themodernsouthernpolytheist:

writeswrongs:

girljanitor:

ghostdaddotcx:

Self reblogging to add a thing I found:

http://overland.org.au/previous-issues/issue-208/feature-malcolm-harris/ 

The account @Anti_Racism_Dog didn’t last long. Twitter suspended it quickly, a fate reserved only for the most aggressive, abusive and hateful users. What could a dog – an anti-racist one, at that – do to deserve it? @Anti_Racism_Dog had one real function: to bark at racist speech on Twitter. The account responded to tweets it deemed racist with the simple response ‘bark bark bark!’ Sometimes it would send wags to supporters but that was pretty much it.

For the short time it lasted, it was amazing to watch how people reacted to @Anti_Racism_Dog. The account would respond mostly to what the sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva would call ‘colour-blind racism’, that is, racisms that are generally right-libertarian in orientation and justified through appeals to supposedly objective discourses like science and statistics. It’s a notoriously insidious white-supremacist ideology, a virulent strain evolved specifically to resist anti-racist language. Colour-blind racism defends itself by appeals to neutrality and meritocracy, accusing its adversaries of being ‘the real racists’. Although its moves are predictable, they’re hard to combat rhetorically since they’re able to ingest the conventional opposition scripts. Colour-blind racists feed on good-faith debate, and engaging with them, especially online, is almost always futile. But when they’re barked at by a dog, one whose only quality is anti-racism, they flip the fuck out. They demand to be engaged in debate (‘Tell me how what I said was racist!’) or appeal to objective definitions (‘The dictionary says racist means X, therefore nothing I said was racist’), but @Anti_Racism_Dog just barks.

@Anti_Racism_Dog inverted the usual balance of energy in online dialogs about race. Precisely because the dominant global discourse is white-supremacist, it is rhetorically easier to make a racist argument than an anti-racist one. Look at almost any comment thread or discussion board about race and you can see anti-racists working laboriously to be convincing and to play on their opponents’ ‘logical’ turf, and racists repeating the same simple lines they were taught (‘I didn’t own slaves’, ‘I’m just stating the facts’, ‘The Irish were persecuted too’, etc.) ‘Trolling’ as a certain kind of internet harassment is tied to time: the successful troll expends much less time and energy on the interaction than their targets do. It’s the most micro of micro-politics, an interpersonal tug of war for the only thing that matters. But have you ever played tug of war with a dog?

A true troll doesn’t have a position to protect because to establish one would leave it vulnerable to attack, and playing defence takes time. @Anti_Racism_Dog, by fully assuming the persona of an animal, was invulnerable to counter-attack. You can’t explain yourself to a dog and you look like an idiot trying. The only way to win is not to play but this is the colour-blind racist’s Achilles Heel: they’re compelled to defend themselves against accusations of racism. It’s the anti-racist argument that gives them content; theirs is an ideology that’s in large part a list of counter-arguments. After all, white-supremacists are already winning – their task now is to keep the same racist structures in place while making plausibly colour-blind arguments against dismantling them. @Anti_Racism_Dog was empty of anything other than accusation and so left its targets sputtering.

The account served a second purpose: as a sort of anti-racist hunting dog. @Anti_Racism_Dog quickly attracted a lot of like-minded followers who understood the dynamics at play. Whenever it would start barking at another user, this was a cue to the dog’s followers to troll the offender as well. There’s only so much one dog can do alone. Colour-blind racism is particularly dangerous because it isn’t immediately visible as such. It provokes good-faith discussion from liberals about what counts as racism, muddying the water. But @Anti_Racism_Dog’s strategy draws new lines about what constitutes acceptable discourse on race, placing colour-blind racists on the other side by speaking to them like an animal. What would be taken as totally insane in flesh space can be infuriatingly clever online. 

THIS ARTICLE HAS TEETH

I WANT ANTI RACISM DOG BACK

fuck twitter Im going to go delete mine

useless piece of shit it is

Ngl, this makes me feel a lot better about the ridiculous amount of time I spend tryin to counter racist bullshit in comments sections.

Bark at racists online 2k17

jynkiess:

I’ve always been under the general impression that if Jyn Erso had been a man she would never have been treated the way she is. She isn’t a great speaker, she keeps to herself, she makes mistakes, she isn’t visually expressive, but these are all just character traits and there isn’t anything wrong with any of them. If she’d been a man they would have called him ‘sensitive’, but she’s a woman so she ‘doesn’t have a personality’. She borrows a line Cassian said that spoke to her and she ‘plagiarized’ him, but Captain America repeats every line anyone has ever said to him and ‘that’s how he say I Love You’. We get stuck in this pattern of “women are Adorkable or Strong Female Character Who Punches People and there’s no inbetween” and that’s not true but Jyn didn’t fit into those two categories so she was wrong in some way, and to some degree, all Star Wars heroines are.

When Leia first appeared on screens she was ‘a bitch’ and ‘needed to be taken down a few notches’

When Padme showed up she was ‘girly’ and ‘overly emotional’

When Rey came out she was ‘too perfect’ and ‘a mary sue’

And Jyn is here and she’s ‘emotionless’ and ‘makes too many mistakes’.

This feels less like women aren’t being represented accurately and more like maybe people just don’t want to see women doing anything at all on the screen.

Bodhi was quiet too. Bodhi had a difficult time expressing himself. They say he’s sensitive. It’s weird how that works.

amandaoneill:

yachtpartysuicide:

pussifoot:

kylo:

kylo:

hetalia was so obviously fucked up how did we as a society allow that fandom to reach the magnitude it did

it’s…quite literally called “Axis Powers Hetalia” and like. no one batted an eye. axis powers is right there in the name

…

Lots of people batted an eye at the time.  Anti-hetalia backlash, especially from Jewish anime fans, was fucking huge.  And it didn’t stop them from invading convention spaces, showing up dressed as nazis, etc.  I heard a story from a friend that while they were at a convention a Jewish kid had a panic attack over a group of Hetalia fans that were dressed as nazis and heiling and shit and the Jewish kid got kicked out of the con for “making a scene.”  I don’t remember the con, but it was in Minnesota.  Hetalia has a large part of the blame for the modern “anime right.”  It certainly didn’t directly cause them, hell, most of them probably aren’t Hetalia fans, but it’s because of Hetalia that they learned they could be openly and brazenly fascist and the American anime community would protect them for it instead of shunning them.

hey the Jewish person was actually one of my friends, this happened at Anime Detour in Minneapolis, MN. this is all true and it was terrible.

eshusplayground:

crookedbajorans:

iamnotsebastianstan:

softblvcknss:

iamnotsebastianstan:

fullmetalfagit:

iamnotsebastianstan:

Have a female lead character? Have a canon confirmed lgbt character? Have that canon confirmed lgbt character be the lead female character? Not disappoint? Wonder Woman does a lot of things most Marvel movies don’t have the guts to do

I loved Wonder Woman but what fucking lgbt character? Lol. Beyond a reach.

The main fucking character, do your research before you try to debunk my claims, thanks. 

I wish it was mentioned in the movie tho

Diana literally lives on an island inhabited solely by women, has never seen a man before she meets Steve, tells him she knows about sexual intercourse and that men are not necessary for pleasure, only for procreation – all that was left was for her to say “by the way, i sleep with girls too”

I get the point being made here, I really do, but softblvcknss is right. Regardless of how heavily it was implied, the film still didn’t overtly address it. It doesn’t count as representation if what’s actually presented onscreen still allows for plausible deniability. Not that I’m saying that was their intention, because I honestly don’t believe it was. But the fact remains that people like the person who commented above can still walk out of the theater fully convinced of Diana’s heterosexuality because nothing in the film directly disputes it. The same can be said of the Amazons as a whole, and Antiope in particular. No one (or at least no one with eyes and a pulse) will argue that Menalippe, Antiope’s lieutenant, was HEAVILY implied to be her lover. Her constant presence at her side, her implicit concern when Antiope was injured while sparring with Diana, and especially her reaction to Antiope’s death all not-so-subtly hint at the true nature of their relationship. But therein lies the problem: that’s all there were. Hints and implications. Nothing explicit. Don’t get me wrong, I’m extremely grateful for what WAS there. It made my tiny, gay-as-a-flannel-covered-rainbow-for-Robin-Wright heart very, very happy. But it’s not enough. Not in 2017. If I’m gonna give you credit for a canon queer character, that character had better be queer IN CANON. And where DC’s cinematic universe is concerned, that means explicitly queer ONSCREEN.

Especially since we all but see Steve’s dick.

(I think the discussion about when does subtext become text is interesting and I would just reblog without commentary but also are hippolyta, antiope and menalippe not sisters?)