girldrinker⚢

part of the issue with the complicated issue of chasers is that most of the ways that chasers are discussed or addressed tend to delineate tmes who are attracted to/date/fuck trans women into two boxes: chasers and nonchasers. even the lowerkey ones are generally sorted into a secretly chaser category. but in reality, there’s no neat line where cultural fetishization ends and personal relationships completely entirely free of some aspects of those ideas and dynamics start. cuz at the end of the day, this is not a matter of behavior, it is an unavoidable phenomenon that results from the oppressive power dynamic between tmes and tmas; transfems are not societally considered to be whole people, we are considered to be sexual objects and tools for other people's enrichment, pleasure, and subjectivity enhancement; meanwhile, we are simultaneously considered to be incapable of goodness to the degree where we poison the personhood of anyone who loves us or engages with us as a fellow human. thus, in any gendered paradigm we are sought after by tmes for the purposes of fulfilling sexual desires, using us for social climbing or scapegoating, or for turning us into theoretical analogy for other phenomena, but without the privilege of being publicly and intimately affiliated with the real humans; we are simultaneously consistently recursively abjected by the tme component of any group. a common experience for a trans woman is to be kept around, but at arms length, as a resource, not as a companion, to exist only when needed, and only until her usefulness in a given setting is exhausted.

chaserdom is not a kind of person that creates this paradigm, it is a function of this paradigm that can be utilized by anyone with gendered power over us (aka tmes), regardless of whether they care for us or see us as humans equal to them. most people on some level know this whether they can directly articulate it or not; it is a very common experience to be approached by tme partners for reassurance that they are not chasers/fetishists. and that's the thing: prioritizing trans women in your life to the point where you want to have a transfem partner actually does involves a fair bit of "preferring" trans women because it is pushing back against a mountain of expectations of the opposite! which brings us to the final component of this: there is no consistent intrinsic difference between a "chaser"'s and a "nonchaser"'s attraction to a transfem! when tmes ask for this kind of reassurance, what they really want (regardless of whether or not they know it) is the assurance that they are innocent of the ability to weaponize/inhabit the paradigm of the chaser against the transfem they love. and the reality is they never are.

while there are definitely certain mindsets of attraction to transfems, or people of color, or fat ppl, that can lend themselves to harm if not corrected, there's no way to truly zero out the possibility of harm via the changing of one's way of thinking, and by framing the paradigm of intrarelationship harm along axes of oppression as an internal problem, we can easily abandon our own responsibility towards our partners to respect their complete humanity to instead pursue a kind of obsessive asymptotic introspection that serves primarily personal self-soothing and innocence-chasing purposes rather than the pursuit of our partners' safety

They want to act like high levels of sickness whether it be airborne or foodborne are normal and not the responsibility of agencies like public health or food safety regulation so they can get away with dismantling them.

its just one manifestation of the v. classic impulse to grasp at markers of legitimacy, esp. when one is trying to make a living selling books or substack or patreon subscriptions. same thing is common among tons of different ideological tendencies, invoking Established Figures and claiming to be their intellectual heirs to lay claim to a commonly accepted font of legitimacy. if there's a reason why radfems and dworkin in particular i think it's partially because--again, if you are trying to make a living off being a professional Theorist and you depend on social media reach to make rent--you want to do something Forbidden and Controversial to help distinguish your brand. i mean if you call your ideological project the heir to judith butler uyouer halfway to just dong queer theory whos gonna click on that u might as well publish at verso

overall a very overtly cynical point of view to be working from to the point it prejudices the analysis. while it might get some clicks it's quite clear as someone inside this bubble that this does not get one more than clicks

Of the many dark-red blotches in USAID’s record, none compares to the agency’s Office of Public Safety (OPS) program — and its most notorious official, Dan Mitrione.

USAID grew out of programs like the Marshall Plan, but the agency itself wasn’t established until 1961 under President Kennedy. Under Kennedy’s reorganization, a police training program set up under President Eisenhower, the Office of Public Safety (OPS), was placed under USAID’s authority. The OPS had been set up in 1957 to train friendly overseas police forces how to be more professional, more democratic, less corrupt, more like us — but in reality, the OPS was essentially a CIA proxy, headed by an agent named Byron Engle, its ranks covertly sprinkled with CIA spooks in hotspots across the globe.

Former New York Times correspondent A. J. Langguth wrote that the “the two primary functions” of the USAID police training program were to allow the CIA to “plant men with local police in sensitive places around the world,” and to bring to the United States “prime candidates for enrollment as CIA employees.” [“Police Program is Called CIA Cover,” New York Times, May 7, 1978]

Dan Mitrione wasn’t a CIA man himself. Mitrione was a small-town cop and a family man from Richmond, Indiana, who joined the FBI, and was sent to Brazil in the early 1960s under USAID’s Office of Public Safety to train the fledging democratic government’s police force. A few years later, in 1964, a US-backed coup overthrew Brazil’s democratically-elected president Joao Goulart, and installed a right-wing military dictatorship that ruled for the next two decades, with largesse from USAID’s coffers, and vital training and equipment supplied by USAID officials like Mitrione.

By the end of the 1960s, when Mitrione left for Uruguay, USAID had trained over 100,000 of Brazil’s police in the dark arts of rule-by-terror; another 600 Brazilian police were brought to the US for special USAID training in explosives and interrogation techniques.

Brazil’s military dictatorship murdered or disappeared hundreds of dissidents, and tortured and jailed thousands more. Among those tortured: a Marxist student named Dilma Rousseff, arrested in 1970 and subjected to beatings to her face that distorted her dental ridge, and electrical shocks from car batteries, resulting in the hemorrhaging of her uterus. Today, Rousseff is Brazil’s president — and she’s not too happy about the NSA tapping her phones.

The junta also murdered one ex-president in a staged car accident in 1976. Another ex-president who allegedly died of a heart attack in 1978 is now believed to have been poisoned.

Once satisfied, Mitrione began teaching human anatomy and the human nervous system to the elite Uruguayan police officials hand-picked by USAID for counter-insurgency training in America. Then — according to a CIA double-agent secretly working for Cuba, Manuel Hevia, and corroborated by journalist A. J. Langguth — Mitrione began performing gruesome live torture demonstrations on homeless beggars plucked off the streets of Montevideo. Four of Mitrione’s human guinea pigs were tortured to death, including one woman — according to Hevia, testing on street beggars was something Mitrione learned to do while training Brazil’s police.

… 

Mitrione took over the USAID police training program in Uruguay in 1969, and within months, the country was racked by allegations of widespread torture and police abuses. In 1970, Uruguay’s Senate opened an investigation and heard testimony from tortured men and women who’d been subjected to electrocutions, genital mutilation and psychological torture.

…

A few more examples of other USAID police training ventures through the Office of Public Safety:

— The Vietnam War: USAID trained police and ran civilian jails. USAID also participated in the “soft” side of the Phoenix Program — funding the failed “Land to the Tillers” program granting peasants small plots of land, a program that has a poor track record, but serves some important foreign policy/propaganda purpose every time it’s rolled out because it remains one of the most enduring boondoggles in the USAID kit.

– Laos: In 1967, USAID Co-funded with the CIA a suspected private opium airliner, Xieng Khouang Air Transport. Later, as the CIA-backed Hmong were under attack from Lao Marxist rebels and North Vietnamese forces, USAID forcibly resettled Hmong families in the line of their advance to protect the pro-US government in Vientaine.

—Guatemala: By 1970, USAID trained over 30,000 Guatemalan police to suppress local leftists, according to William Blum’s book “Killing Hope.” Just over a decade later, Guatemalan death squads under US-backed dictator Rios Montt unleashed a genocide on the Mayan peasants.

According to Victoria Sanford’s “Buried Secrets: Truth and Human Rights in Guatemala,” USAID programs supported the death squads as they carried out the genocide.

—El Salvador: According to NYU historian Greg Grandin, in El Salvador, where 75,000 were killed between 1979 and 1992.

VOLITION [Easy: Success] -- No. This is somewhere to be. This is all you have, but it's still something. Streets and sodium lights. The sky, the world. You're still alive.

alright so some pretty important background to all this is that we're all talking about the fact that bananas, grown in the global south, are available year-round at extremely low prices all around europe and the USA. it's not really about bananas per so--the banana in this discourse is a synechdoche for all the economic benefits of imperialism.

so how are cheap bananas a result of imperialism? first of all i want to tackle a common and v. silly counterargument: 'oh, these ridiculous communists think it's imperialist for produce to be shipped internationally'. nah. believing that this is the communist objection requires believing in a deeply naive view of international traide. this view goes something like 'well, if honduras has lots of bananas, and people in the usa want bananas and are willing to pay for them, surely everyone wins when the usa buys bananas!'.

there are of course two key errors here and they are both packed into 'honduras has lots of bananas'. for a start, although the bananas are grown in honduras, honduras doesn't really 'have' them, because the plantations are mostly owned by chiquita (formerly known as united fruit) dole, del monte, and other multinationals--when they're not, those multinationals will usually purchase the bananas from honduran growers and conduct the export themselves. and wouldn't you know it, it's those intervening middleman steps--export, import, and retail, where the vast majority of money is made off bananas! so in the process of a banana making its way from honduras to a 7/11, usamerican multinationals make money selling the bananas to usamerican importers who make money selling them to usamerican retailers who make money selling them to usamerican customers.

when chiquita sells a banana to be sold in walmart, a magic trick is being performed: a banana is disappearing from honduras, and yet somehow an american company is paying a second american company for it! this is economic imperialism, the usamerican multinational extracting resources from a nation while simultaneously pocketing the value of those resources.

why does the honduran government allow this? if selling bananas is such a bad deal for the nation, why do they continue to export millions of dollars of banans a year? well, obviously, there's the fact that if they didn't, they would face a coup. the united states is more than willing to intervene and cause mass death and war to protect the profits of its multinationals. but the second, more subtle thing keeping honduras bound to this ridiculously unbalanced relationship is the need for dollars. because the US dollar is the global reserve currency, and the de facto currency of international trade, exporting to the USA is a basic necessity for nations like honduras, guatemala, &c. why is the dollar the global reserve currency? because of usamerican military and economic hegemony, of course. imperialism built upon imperialism!

this is unequal exchange, the neoimperialist terms of international trade that make the 'global economy' a tool of siphoning value and resources from the global south to the imperial core. & this is the second flaw to unravel in 'honduras has a lot of bananas' -- honduras only 'has a lot of bananas' because this global economic hegemony has led to vast unsustainable monoculture banana plantations to dominate the agriculture of honduras. it's long-attested how monoculture growth is unsustainable because it destroys soil and leads to easily-wiped-out-by-infection plants.

so, bananas in the USA are cheap because:

the workers that grow them are barely paid, mistreated, prevented from unionizing, and sometimes murdered

the nations in which the bananas are grown accept brutally unfair trade and tariff terms with the USA because they desperately need a supply of US dollars and so have little position to negotiate

shipping is also much cheaper than it should be because sailors are chronically underpaid and often not paid at all or forced to pay to work (!)

bananas are cheap, in conclusion, because they're produced by underpaid and brutalized workers and then imported on extortionate and unfair terms.

so what, should we all give up bananas? no, and it's a sign of total lack of understanding of socialism as a global movement that all the pearl-clutching usamericans have latched onto the scary communists telling them to stop buying bananas. communism does not care about you as a consumer. individual consumptive choices are not a meaningful arena of political action. the socialist position is not "if there was a socialist reovlution in the usa, we would all stop eating bananas like good little boys", but rather, "if there's a socialist revolution in the countries where bananas are grown, then the availability of bananas in the usa is going to drop, and if you want to be an anti-imperialist in the imperial core you have to accept that".

(this is where the second argument i see about this, 'oh what are you catholic you want me to eat dirt like a monk?' reveals itself as a silly fucking solipsistic misunderstanding)

and again, let's note that the case of the banana can very easily be generalised out to coffee, chocolate, sugar, etc, and that it's not about individual consumptive habits, but about global economic systems. if you are donkey fucking kong and you eat 100 bananas a day i don't care and neither does anyone else. it's about trying to illustrate just one tiny mundane way in which economic imperialism makes the lives of people in the global north more convenient and simpler and so of course there is enormous pushback from people who attach moral value to this and therefore feel like the mean commies are personally calling them evil for eating a nutella or whatever which is frankly pretty tiring. Sad!