parsimonious

We used to think of the time of the vikings, the three long centuries from around 750 to 1050 CE, as an age of expansion, when the Scandinavian peoples burst out upon an unsuspecting world with fire and sword. Over the past 40 years or so, that picture has become much more nuanced, as we see the poets, traders and settlers alongside the stereotypical raiders (who were nonetheless real) that most people imagine when they think of the vikings. However, our view of these events has recently changed. We no longer see an outward impulse of intention and process, but a much more haphazard and varied diaspora of Norse peoples, in which individuals with their own motives and missions shift across the northern world. What does that diaspora look like? A settler on Orkney might divide the year between fishing and overseas piracy. A wealthy woman in a Swedish town might sponsor raids in the west. A person in Arctic Fennoscandia might span the very different worlds of the Norse and Saami. Another might journey deep into the rivers of Eurasia, only to die in the oasis of Khwarezm (in today’s Uzbekistan), but his companions would return to Scandinavia with the news. The ‘Norse’ voyages to North America would be crewed by people who included Icelanders, Greenlanders, a Turk, and two Scots. All these are taken from archaeological or textual sources, and serve as but a few examples of what the diaspora really meant. This was also a fluid time of reciprocal movement involving immigration into Scandinavia as well as movement away. The viking presence in Europe is well known, extending east to Constantinople and the rivers of western Russia and Ukraine, alongside the settlement of the North Atlantic islands and ultimately a landfall on the coast of Newfoundland. But a key question remains: how far did that diaspora extend, especially to the south and east? How far did the vikings really travel?

-one time in a department store a Black man made eye contact with me and didn’t immediately avert his gaze

-one time a panhandler approached me and asked for money

-one time I saw two muscular men on the same block downtown and they seemed like they knew each other???

-one time I had a conversation with an autistic man and he didn’t understand my social cues of disinterest

-I got catcalled from a passing car once

-one time I saw a Black man walking with a white woman and if I squinted and projected my discomfort on her I could sort of imagine that she looked scared and unhappy, or maybe she just needed to poop, but she was like probably his captive or something

-once I saw a child that appeared to maybe be a different race from the adult they were with

-a woman tried to scam me into buying something for more than it was worth and it was probably a scheme to get me alone and stuff me into a trunk and smuggle me to Mexico

-I heard a group of people speaking a language other than English to each other and I just knew they were describing how they planned to sell me into sexual slavery

the OG of the vicious burn

During my first month with my therapist, I was given this worksheet to read and work on. She noticed that while I was talking with her, that my thoughts followed a lot of these. I wasn’t aware that my anxiety had brought me down paths of low self-worth and stinky thinking.  After a couple of weeks of talking with her, she gave me this worksheet to work on. 

Such as:

- Men with more spending power purchasing homes in their name alone and having their wife pay rent. She will have no legal rights to that house despite caring for the home and financially contributing.

- When women have significantly less disposable income than their spouse because they're a stay at home mother or a lower earner so he can make large discretionary purchases that only benefit him but all her money goes towards household bills and expenses.

- When a woman interrupts her career trajectory to have children/ lowers her earning potential due to the motherhood tax but then has to continue paying her "share" of the bills although the man made no such sacrifices.

- When household labor isn't viewed as actual labor and is primarily taken care of by the wife who then has a 2nd shift that impacts her professional progress/ earnings but has to pay her "share" despite the unfair arrangement.

- When one spouse has significant financial needs such as high medical expenses, tuition, etc so their standard of living is significantly lower than their partner

Before we can attempt closeness, we need to have security. Through his research, Dr. Levine has identified the five foundational elements of secure relationships, which he refers to as CARRP.

Consistency (Do these friends drift in and out of my life on a whim?)

Availability (How available are they to spend time together?)

Reliability (Can I count on them if I need something?)

Responsiveness (Do they reply to my emails and texts? Do I hear from them on a consistent basis?)

Predictability (Can I count on them to act in a certain way?)

Once these five elements are in place, it can pave the way to a deeper connection. “From an attachment perspective, once we feel safe, we can start being more adventurous and playful, which helps us at work, raising our kids, in every aspect of our lives,” Dr. Levine said.

That doesn’t mean that you have to respond to texts within the hour, but it does mean that you need to create a baseline of responsiveness and availability so your friends feel secure in your friendship. Likewise, if you have friends who are flaky, unresponsive or unreliable, it will serve you to try to see if they can become more CARRP and if not, look to other people for close friendship.

I encourage people to research anything that sounds fantastic and totally different than what they were taught - even in my posts.

If you read startling information in a book, article, or a blog post, do the CRAAP Test! (developed by Sarah Blakeslee and her team of librarians at California State University, Chico)

Currency:  What is the copyright, publication, or posting date? Does the date matter? Is the information outdated?

Relevance:  For what audience or level is the information written (general public, experts/scholars, etc.)?

Authority:  Who is the author, creator, or publisher of the source or what organization is responsible for the source? How do you know if the author is an expert on the topic (e.g examine the author’s credentials and/or organizational affiliation)?

Accuracy:  What indications do you see that the information is or is not well researched or provides sufficient evidence? What kind of language, imagery and/or tone is used (e.g. emotional, objective, professional, etc.)?

Purpose:  Why was this source written (e.g.to inform, teach, entertain, persuade)? How might the author’s affiliation affect the point of view, slant, or potential bias of the source?

More help:

The Ultimate Cheatsheet for Critical Thinking

Judging Source Quality

The Layperson’s Guide to Online Research

Media Bias/Fact Check Use the search feature to find the bias (left, right, center, and in-between) of any news source.

Snopes fact check

How to Spot Fake News from FactCheck.org

What is a “Good” Source? Determining the Validity of Evidence

given power, people apparently do whatever they want. this sounds simple, but consider how tricky figuring out what you want is?

power, in sufficiently large quantities, means constantly being surrounded by people who are trying to do whatever it is that you want, whether or not you know what it is that you want in the first place.

it’s the reason powerful people’s “gut feelings” are so effective from their perspective. like, if you have people around you who do whatever you want, you don’t need to understand what they do or why they do it or what you actually want, you just need to keep track of your feelings and like, add up all the feelings that co-occurred with any given person and you’ll zoom in on the “most effective person” (synonymously) “most loyal person” (synonymously) “greatest toady” around.

the point being, your petty cruelties and unexamined-gut-prejudices are also things that go into your “want”.

power reveals. it digs out your worst desires and removes from you the need/ability to critically examine them.

Trivia 1: The Roman republic’s model for granting political power to individuals was to make it unlimited in scope but limited in time (the institution of the dictatorship); Cincinnatus laying down the dictatorship and retiring to his farming estate was the sort of folk hero of this model. Of course (1) we all know how well this worked out in the end, and (2) someone’s a lot more willing to voluntarily cede political power when they, you know, have a farming estate to retire to.

People really, really need to understand that the rescue industry is real, it is run by American right wing evangelical Christians, and they're doing this for three major reasons.

Firstly, they believe sex work is immoral because they believe any sex outside of a heterosexual, monogamous, Christian marriage is immoral.

Secondly, they get material benefits from it, this is a business model; they capture sex workers in exploited nations with the criminalization model and push them into "diversion" programs where they are forced to work in sweatshop conditions, usually in garment manufacturing. Since these NGOs are registered as "charities" they also function as a tax dodge. Finally, they use these diversion programs to try to convert sex workers into their sick brand of right wing Christianity.

Since these are powerful US companies they are able to influence global politics including how sex work is treated in other countries. As of now they are running show throughout much of Asia and Africa specifically so they can make money off criminalizing sex workers into manufacturing cheap clothing that then goes on to be sold as "providing new opportunities for rescued sex slaves".

The sex slavery narratives is being pushed by the evangelical Christian right to dupe people who are trying to do the right thing. They even collect donations to fund their "raid and rescue" missions where they arrest and imprison sex workers.

Consider companies like Punjammies and Outland Denim who do exactly this

https://sexworkinfo.tumblr.com/post/186630380090/as-soon-as-this-appeared-in-my-ads-i-had-a-bad#notes

https://jezebel.com/buy-these-pajamas-rescue-a-prostitute-or-why-rescue-1688197906

https://youtu.be/EnXhB1XtL2o

https://foreignpolicy.com/2015/07/22/the-new-abolitionists-mexico-dominican-republic-human-trafficking-mormon-our/

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/poverty-matters/2014/nov/28/global-slavery-index-walk-free-human-trafficking-anne-gallagher

Consider how evangelical Christians are shaping the global discourse on sex work

https://www.rawstory.com/2018/01/evangelical-women-are-shaping-public-attitudes-about-sex-work/

Here's a lot of information about sex worker activism across Asia

http://www.khaosodenglish.com/opinion/2019/08/10/opinion-the-double-denial-of-sex-work-in-thailand/

https://www.refworld.org/docid/5229b72f4.html

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2019/05/17/asia-pacific/social-issues-asia-pacific/health-insurance-time-off-empowered-sex-workers-thailand-battle-stigma/

https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_58a74d70e4b045cd34c170aa?test_ad=readmo_test

https://www.bangkokpost.com/thailand/general/1026053/prostitution-laws-in-need-of-overhaul

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/8gen84/blow-jobs-are-real-jobs-v23n1

https://rewire.news/article/2012/09/23/why-sex-workers-must-be-part-global-human-rights-agenda/

http://theladiesfinger.com/meena-seshu-get-right-sex-work/

https://asiasociety.org/blog/asia/lives-sex-workers-modern-china

https://www.nationthailand.com/national/30343500

https://www.nationthailand.com/national/48-Thai-sex-workers-arrested-in-South-Korea-30279748.html

While neoliberalism as an ideology clearly originates from the right wing, it's a distinct political and economic phenomenon that predates the left/right framing of politics by almost 200 years and occurs within this specific historical moment - especially important here is the rise of evangelism (especially following the AIDS crisis) and the globalisation of American evangelical Christianity.

What I'm referring to here, then, is the dominance of private industry over every aspect of life and the incestuous relationship between private industry, government, and the social sphere that lead to this situation where private companies masquerading as charities can use Evangelical Christianity as an ideology to force foreign governments into criminalizing their own people, use them as sweatshop labour, and frame it as rescuing them.

Clearly there are some new concepts here so let me give you some further reading (not that you read anything I included here anyway but hey, perhaps you'll feel more confident when you have some background understanding of what I'm talking about)

An examination of the relationship between evangelical Christianity and neoliberalism in exploited nations (specifically focused on Honduras and Guatemala)

Compassionate Neoliberalism?: Evangelical Christianity, the Welfare State, and the Politics of the Right

Neoliberalism, Politics, and Evangelical Faith in America

Here's a fairly accessible article on neoliberalism and the prosperity doctrine (a belief that comes from evangelical Christianity) in Australia - remember, Australia has two mining millionaires who fund these rescue industry NGOs - Gina Rinehart and Twiggy Forrest

Hopefully that helps to explain the terminology here so you can participate in this discussion too :)

P.S.

Just as frequently, however, there was no tragedy that preceded people’s transformations. Rather, they changed because they were embedded in social groups that made change easier. One woman said her entire life shifted when she signed up for a psychology class and met a wonderful group. “It opened a Pandora’s box,” the woman told researchers. “I could not tolerate the status quo any longer. I had changed in my core.” Another man said that he found new friends among whom he could practice being gregarious. “When I do make the effort to overcome my shyness, I feel that it is not really me acting, that it’s someone else,” he said. But by practicing with his new group, it stopped feeling like acting. He started to believe he wasn’t shy, and then, eventually, he wasn’t anymore. When people join groups where change seems possible, the potential for that change to occur becomes more real. For most people who overhaul their lives, there are no seminal moments or life-altering disasters. There are simply communities⏤sometimes of just one other person⏤who make change believable.

One woman told researchers her life transformed after a day spent cleaning toilets⏤and after weeks of discussing with the rest of the cleaning crew whether she should leave her husband.

“Change occurs among other people,” one of the psychologists involved in the study, Todd Heatherton, told me. “It seems real when we can see it in other people’s eyes.”

The precise mechanisms of belief are little understood. No one is certain why a group encountered in a psychology class can convince a woman that everything is different, or why Dungy’s team came together after their coach’s son passed away. Plenty of people talk to friends about unhappy marriages and never leave their spouse; lots of teams watch their coaches experience adversity and never gel. 

But we do know that for habits to permanently change, people must believe that change is feasible. The same process that makes AA so effective⏤the power of a group to teach individuals how to believe⏤happens whenever people come together to help one another change. Belief is easier when it occurs within a community.”

Ai Weiwei, “Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn,” 1995

An astonishingly irreverent piece of work.  This triptych features the artist dropping a Han Dynasty (206 BC - 220 AD) in three photographs.  

When questioned about the work, he suggested that the piece was about industry: “[The urn] was industry then and is industry now.”  His statement, therefore, was that the urn was just a cheap pot two thousand years ago, and the reverence we feel toward it is artificial.  One critic wrote: “In other words, for all the aura of preciousness acquired by the accretion of time (and skillful marketing), this vessel is the Iron Age equivalent of a flower pot from K-Mart and if one were to smash the latter a few millennia from now, would it be an occasion for tears?”

For example, it's a fairly traditional and fairly non-controversial (knock on wood) part of class-struggle-oriented thinking that the working class only exists as a product of the internal logic of capital and the dependence of capital on labor, and that as soon as capital ceases to exist the working class will necessarily cease to exist as well. The same could be said for like women-as-a-class vis-a-vis the ideology and practices that constitute "gender;" should those things cease to exist, "women" will cease to have enough similarity of experience to be meaningfully described as a coherent sociological unit, i.e. a class (whether that similarity of experience even exists right now is a discussion for another time).

In contrast, in even the most progressive nationalist thinking, the nation is figured as something that predates imperialism (or whatever other word it is you want to use to describe the system of oppression we're talking about), and which God willing will survive it. The language might be superficially quite similar but look at what an absolute 180-degree turn that is, in terms of how this struggle is conceived and in terms of The Implications™ for carrying it out.

Now what's even more sinister is that it's not really true to say that nation is unlike socioeconomic class, in that it's not defined by an adversarial relationship. Because there are plenty of less starry-eyed nationalists out there for whom the nation does in fact derive its existence from a contradiction, in the same way that the contradiction between capital and labor is what gives "labor" its existence and defines its shape. The contradiction in question, where the nation is concerned, is - to put it bluntly - "us-like-is vs. them-not-like-us." In fact, this is the only thing that really gives the nation its ontological kick (the external signifiers of any given national identity are, I would argue, little more than window dressing), and this concept is therefore very shallowly submerged in even the most outwardly progressive nationalisms.

But it's not really the us-vs.-themness of nationalism that I want to critique, since it's hard to politically mobilize any kind of class without leaning into something similar. What I want to point out is the fact that the contradiction between nations - absolutely unlike the radical understandings of socioeconomic class or gender - is viewed as something without a time horizon. It's not something any nationalist seeks to abolish, because it's not something nationalists believe can be abolished. Again, no matter how outwardly similar, the nationalist is different from the radical leftist because they do not identify their classes with the system of oppression they are criticising.

Historiographically speaking "ethnolinguistic groups" aren't of much functional use except for those wishing to project nations into the past. They don't, like, do anything; every instance of action being attributed to an ethnolinguistic group ("the Anglo-Saxons" coming to Britain, for instance) would be far more appropriately described in terms of the action of political or economic entities, i.e. in terms that actually help explain why things happened a certain way. Really this is also the case today; I think we can all appreciate why "America [the state] invaded Iraq" is practically preferable to "the Americans invaded Iraq."

Monolingualism is, historically, vanishingly rare. Even today it only exists for a small minority of the world's population, almost exclusively in situations of extreme power differentials. An ethnolinguistic group or proto-nation is supposed to be defined by "its" language, yet of the ancestors of modern-day Armenians perhaps 50% were speaking Ottoman Turkish at home 100 years ago, and none were speaking anything that sounded much like modern standard Armenian. As a method of systematically describing the world, nationalism is mostly notable for how few of its pronouncements bear any recognisable relation to observable reality (I guess you can see why nationalists and market fetishists tend to hit it off so well).

It has its place, and that’s mainly in the mental health realm. I’m a super anxious person. I get depressed easily. Articles talking about little steps I can take to reduce my carbon footprint give me tangible ways I can contribute to the solution, and help give me a sense of control over the whole mess, however illusionary it may be.

The framing of the narrative is the problem, not the narrative itself; guilt-tripping people never works. Pointing out “if you’re feeling scared, here’s some steps you can take to be part of the process” is way, WAY better. And the more steps you include, the more myriad ways you can take some ownership of the process and go “I am NOT powerless you motherfuck,” the better. Not everyone can take all of the listed steps and that’s COMPLETELY understandable. You gotta take care of you, first. But the more we list, the more accessible ways we come up with to give climate change the finger in our everyday lives, and to refuse to let the fear win.

By all means, go after the corporations. They’re the big fuckers here and I am totally on board with that. But if you’re feeling helpless and hopeless? Maybe take a look at one of those “how can I help” articles and pick a few little things to implement.

Here are some things I’ve done:

I periodically drop by home depot and other box stores, and if I see a big sale on LED lights I buy a ton of them. I have installed LED’s at dozens of people’s homes, probably saving collectively thousands of dollars. I also approached my apartment complex and replaced incandescent bulbs both in their office and their laundry room with LED’s…the laundry room lights are on nearly 24/7 and it’s a big space, and this has probably saved them around $300 annually for something that cost me around $20. And now the apartment complex really appreciates this so they’ve been very accomodating when I ask for things like doing non-essential improvements or upgrades in my apartment.

There is a wild area behind my apartment complex and it’s part owned by the complex and part owned by the city. A large area of it was completely overgrown with invasive plants. I pulled a lot of them out and added a lot of seeds of locally native plants, and the plant growth now is MUCH more lush…there is much more biomass and also much more biodiversity. Some trees have sprung up that are now 9 feet tall and growing raipdly during the growing season. This stuff is all gonna sequester a lot of carbon. I also have planted previously barren areas of mulch flower beds densely with native flowers. These also sequester carbon and also contribute to biodiversity. The habitat created by all this work will also help insects and other species that are having their ranges altered by climate change, to adapt, by giving them more habitat.

I chose to live in a place where I don’t need to use my car very much. I went from driving my car around 10,000 miles a year to driving it under 5,000 miles a year. This has saved me a ton of money (not just gas, but also maintenance, tolls, parking, and much lower insurance) and also improved my quality of life.

I make periodic posts and videos about the things I’m doing, and I talk to friends. I also talk to businesses and mention energy-efficient things in reviews of businesses I write on Yelp. For example, if I notice a restaurant uses LED lighting I note that in the review and say I appreciate it, or the same for supermarkets like ALDI that make greater use of enclosed refridgerator cases.

I and my brother continually pressed my parents until they did an energy audit of their home. We got them to buy a new furnace, add some insulation, fix some areas where air was leaking out, and get heat-insulating shades on some rooms with drafty windows, and we also tweaked the baseboard system. The house is now much more pleasant and even in temperature, and we’ve saved them thousands of dollars in heating costs that were associated with unnecessary fossil fuel use.

You may have different things you can do, but the point is, you can do big, substantial things. It’s not just personal choices, you can offer to help other people. You can research things, get good at doing certain things, and then share that knowledge with others.

You can save people money, hundreds or thousands of dollars. And people will appreciate that, like my apartment complex really likes me as a tenant and I see it in how they treat me, they’ve let me do A LOT of things that I asked like having a garden and planting things in vacant flower beds and upgrading things in my unit. And my parents really appreciate the work my brother and I did in the house and the things we convinced them to do cause they’re saving a ton of money already and the house is more comfy.

You are a bunch of muscles carrying you around. A bunch of senses experiencing the world. A processing system that transforms food into energy. Energy reserves in the form of fat that additionally protects vulnerable organs.

Some of your insides may function less well than average of cause you pain, but if you are alive it is because your body is working for you. All your experiences happen through your body.

You may also want need to spend time focusing on the fact that you are worthy and have a right to exist, which means you have a right to take up physical space.