disintegration

their (live!) young gestate for. wait for it. eight to eighteen (??) YEARS. can have up to 10 at a time. good grief.

longest lifespan of any vertebrate, up to five hundred years

toxic flesh

has giant eyes but is usually blind because of a weird little crustacean that's evolved to live on and eat their eyes. this doesn't seem to bother them much.

lives in deep cold water and has the lowest swim speed and tail-beat frequency for its size across all fish species. just generally lives life in extreme slow motion

largest genome of any shark

eats everything including moose and polar bears

Scapegoat now states that women have no history but, if we did, it would be “a history of rape: the pogrom against the female body. The constant juxtaposition cuts short the breath that one would normally use to assess each claim, as it comes, before moving onto what follows. It turns my stomach in a way I suspect was not intended. A sudden comment on Chinese footbinding caps off, for instance, many paragraphs on the patriarchal oppression of women in Gaza. An abrupt swerve into Jew-on-Jew pimping follows many paragraphs on the pornographic core of National Socialism. A patronizing assessment of Palestinian women’s role in the resistance melts into yet another survey of state-sanctioned prostitution across the centuries. Dworkin has set herself the task to prove, inexorably—through a widening gyre of montage-based equivalences—that the “woman-hate” in men’s hearts really is everywhere, left and right. This hate will remain until women rise up across borders and draw new borders for themselves by seizing a homeland—an “Israel”—away from men. Her mission is carried out quite well. I just consider it fascistic, not least in its insistence on female innocence. Dworkin’s account of history is dazzlingly erudite and stunningly stupid at once: men have wrought it all. Even if your definition of “history” is strictly military, this is unpardonable stuff: armed struggles have always featured women leaders, such as, in the case of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Abla Taha, Latifa Howari, Sarah Joudeh and Leila Khaled. Dworkin doesn’t mention these or any other Palestinian women militants and reckons that feminism is not currently possible in the Arab world: “in the sensibility of contemporary Arab women, the Palestinian male is the romantic figure,” not the Palestinian woman. Tellingly, the whole question of Palestinian women’s anti-Zionist struggle is dealt with only indirectly, merged with a discussion of “the heroism of Algerian women fighters” between 1954 and ’62 whose purpose is to ram home the lesson that national liberation movements always betray their women. Besides, when women participate in struggle, it’s “because they can be used and useful” and “get a temporary pass from complete servility.” Also, “the subsuming of the individual in the nationalist struggle is an easy process for women, who have little experience with a social reification of a singular identity.” These women are fodder for revolutionary movements, Dworkin misogynistically opines, because they have no self. All the litanies of rape-related facts in previous Dworkin books like Intercourse have palpably been dress-rehearsals for the remix in chapter three. “Rape,” she raps here mid-infodump, “is murder’s heartbeat.” It’s an undeniably dope line. What’s odd is how, while the wretched of the earth are always women, “Pogrom/Rape” rests on the leftfield assertion that “Israeli men get raped.” Dworkin alleges that “the rape of a defeated foe, soldier, male” is “part of the Arab code, coexisting with the obligation of the father or brother to kill the sister for sexual impurity.” She extrapolates further, on the strength of the book Arab and Jew (1987) by former New York Times Jerusalem Bureau chief David Shipler, that Palestinian men are engaged in a “revenge vendetta through male-male rape.” It is in fact purely on this basis—that is, unevidenced testimony cited by Shipler from a former Haganah paramilitary veteran (and, later, IDF/IOF colonel) Rafi Horowitz, recalling the Arab Legion systematically gouging eyes and mutilating genitals—that Dworkin delivers her chilling verdict: “the revenge rape of male Israeli soldiers in captivity is part of the fear, part of the hate, that drives the Israeli fear of annihilation.” It’s her concluding point, and given that rape, for Dworkin, is the supreme justifier of bloody preemptive defense, there can be no mistaking what is being justified here.

anyway this particular group does (or did?) have kind of a nucleus of very committed members who were more tight knit and ended up taking on a lot of the practical work themselves. they were your more serious vanguard party type communists, very much structure and role enjoyers, which is probably why things eventually played out the way they did. they took their commitments seriously and were constantly sort of irked that others saw the voluntary nature of the group as a reason to deprioritise it in favour of what might be life necessities but are still basically capitalist pursuits. fair, maybe.

about this time last summer, that inner circle apparently decided to get more serious about recruitment and figure out how to do outreach in a way that would bring in more committed membership to reliably spread the workload. the way these things go, a couple of these guys had originally met through a local gay bar's drag nights (specifically the drag king circuit) so one of the first things they did was draft in another friend who did marketing for those events already and get him pushing for more eyeballs on their event listings via twitter and instagram.

now, bar guy was very very good at this. one of his big innovations was the idea of using club promoter type strategies to get more students more consistently engaged with the group's activities. that basically meant appointing some of the more active members as 'outreach officers' and encouraging them to do things like organise socials for new volunteers and train those people in turn as recruiters, with a tiny bit of a floating budget for pot lucks and house parties every couple of months.

this worked astonishingly well, like beyond anyone's wildest expectations. at a certain point they had brand new members throwing their own parties just to introduce their friends to the people who recruited them, who in turn had been recruited by the volunteers the outreach officers trained. it worked so well that it got to be a problem because most of these newer members were also relatively new to organising and didn't have a whole lot of theory. it was getting very vibes based and suddenly there was a huge influx of people to handle who most original members didn't know. and also, because they'd asked a gay guy who promoted gay club nights to organise all this peer-to-peer recruitment, it turned out almost all the new members were gay men.

in itself that's not necessarily a problem, but obviously it presents a challenge for a group that's supposed to be open and diverse. especially because outside of the little clique who started all this, most of the old guard were not gay men. it didn't blow up into the kind of messy schism it could have, fortunately, but a lot of the older members (especially those who were less into the hardline soviet-nostalgia communist utopianism of the main organisers) decided around this point that they didn't feel the group was a good fit for them any more, and split.

so now the inner circle had a new problem. the remaining group was overwhelmingly now made up of very sweet well intentioned young gay men who wanted to volunteer with this cool voluntary circle of other young gay men who liked to party, and vanishingly few of them actually knew a whole lot about mao or lenin or the practicalities of community organising or what have you. but club guy was like "don't worry I've got this", and suddenly out of nowhere started producing all this orientation literature and politics 101 material that he was chain emailing to his army of new recruits and recruiters. like he just had all this shit ready to go. he had slogans, he had essays, he had these weird point by point breakdowns of what karl marx would have to say about your college courses and why communism was like actually a lot like bdsm if you think about it.

you will probably not be shocked to learn that it very quickly came out he had been generating all this shit with chatgpt. the group went into absolute meltdown, the vanguard party shut down their website and disassociated themselves completely from the whole mess, and the last I heard they're back to organising with some of the older group members and whoever turns up whenever they turn up. but club guy was unrepentant, he'd already sent out all his ideologyslop to his recruiters, who had sent it to their guys who sent it to their guys, who I guess are still out there recruiting twinks into the fully automated contentless communism mill,

1. make a syllabus for yourself - books, media, places, recipes

2. complete 40% of it

Oh, but had the artisan who made me created me instead – a worthy woman... ...I would say "how lucky am I"

Father in heaven who did miracles for our ancestors with fire and water... ...Who would then transform me from a man to woman? Were I only to have merited this being so graced by goodness...

What shall I say? why cry or be bitter? If my father in heaven has decreed upon me and has maimed me with an immutable deformity then I do not wish to remove it. the sorrow of the impossible is a human pain that nothing will cure and for which no comfort can be found. So, I will bear and suffer until I die and wither in the ground. Since I have learned from our tradition that we bless both, the good and the bitter I will bless in a voice hushed and weak: blessed are you [HaShem] who has not made me a woman.

Katie Harris is photographed with her Appaloosa. Harris made most of the horse trappings as well as her own traditional outfits herself, including the bead work. Some of the trappings are passed down from older generations but the girls like to make their own to continue the tradition.