the url is a reclamation

KS: I’m building on arguments that black feminist theorists made in the 1980s that gender is a racial structure. Womanhood is not a universal category, but instead is an aspect of whiteness that was positioned by definition as unobtainable for nonwhite women, specifically black women. I looked at the scientists who were inventing and codifying the idea of sex difference in the 19th century— not just the cultural role of gender, but the idea of physiological and anatomical sex difference, the binary of a male and female body. Those folks argued that full sex differentiation was only achieved by whites. No other races have achieved the level of evolutionary specification where they were able to differentiate between the distinct roles of men and women.

This is super-surprising, because we assume that the idea of male and female as two opposing categories is universal— at least in Western thought. But before the 19th century, male and female bodies were described as more alike than different. For example, in the 18th century, the vagina was often described in medical textbooks as an internal penis. It’s not arguing that bodies are identical, but it’s arguing a fundamental similarity.

And there are so many articles and videos and discussions. Like, the scientific community is buzzing about this.

So much research will have to be redone because the data was absolutely compromised, off by orders of magnitude, by using standard lab gloves.

The world is probably not horrifically contaminated by microplastics. Sterile laboratories, however, are contaminated by latex and nitrile gloves.

Sources beyond dude just trust me, for the skeptics.

https://www.technologynetworks.com/applied-sciences/news/scientists-lab-gloves-may-be-causing-an-overestimation-of-microplastics-411138

Nitrile and latex gloves may cause overestimation of microplastics - Phys.org (it’s a pdf)

probably sounds a bit obtuse; as an illustrative example, consider how brown men with refugee status are, among imperial core nations, narrativized as brutish rapists intent on impregnating white women. their status as men is, in fact, integral to the way society narrates their existence and the systemic violence enforced on them; if they were not gendered, both by society and by themselves, as men, then it would not be possible for these societal narratives to exist. the traits being ascribed to this violent narrative are traits uniquely reserved for men within patriarchy; while racialized women are cast as violent and brutish in different ways, their presumed role in reproductive labor means they simply are not cast by the patriarchy, broadly speaking, as threats to the sanctity of white women's reproductive capacity. racialization makes the experience of being male-gendered by society inherently violent, in this context; the traits that are reserved for men within patriarchy are recognized in you, but they are not rewarded, they are seen as fundamentally dangerous and animalistic; in patriarchy, traits that bring white men closer to enlightenment make brown men savage and violent.

that got super in-depth on one specific example but there's a lot of intersections like that out in the world. disability is one that's criminally underlooked; the way being coercively gendered as male intersects with developmental disability results in a pattern of malgendering and degendering that seems awfully familiar. i see it all the time; once i learned to stop seeing "male" as "default" and automatically start seeing "male-gendered experiences" as unique and separate from ungendered or gender-agnostic experiences, i started seeing the ways that society constructs manhood to punish specific types of men everywhere.

Like, if these people have done the most damage to society, to the safety and dignity of minorities, to the basic decency upon which the world functions, are they willing to stand at the front of the effort to fix that damage?

I am genuinely begging people on this post to realize that our current system CREATES the issues y'all come onto this post to use as proof restorative justice won't work. There are many reasons people resist change, but one very relevant one is that a system where accountability is inherently tied to suffering does not motivate people to put in the effort to change. A deeply hurt person who has developed a lot of very toxic habits, who struggles to imagine a life for themself where they don't rely on those habits to have a sense of identity and safety, may seem like someone who "doesn't want to change." If we assume that is true, then no one tries to help, then there is no reason for that person to believe change is possible or that they could ever be cared for by society given what they've done, so why try?

I am truly fucking begging y'all to talk to like. Any poor white person from the rural US South who realized how evil and systemic white supremacy is, and becomes extremely personally invested in fighting that in their community. This is not some abstract hypothetical. & there are MANY people who would very much be willing to change, if change actually seems feasible. If you see yourself as unforgivable, because everyone around you seems to see you as unforgivable, is it not easier to just dig your heels in?

We NEED!!!!!!! people to be willing to come over to our side and that simply will not fucking happen if your every reaction to "we need to have a process that allows people to make amends and which incentives meaningful change" is "ohhhhhh but that's hard tho :("

having a process for people who have done morally horrific things to make amends, rejoin community, and do right going forward is actually fundamentally crucial for the left

Then, when me and @magicrainbowkitties rightfully pointed out that people who do the worst things have to both accept that they've done those worst things and also that to make amends they'll have to accept the greatest amount of risk in making things right.

You then promptly shifted entirely to

Any poor white person from the rural US South who realized how evil and systemic white supremacy is

That is literally what this post is saying we need to have a process for. What exactly are you caveating here????????????

I'm not moving any goalposts. I didn't say "someone who said slurs a couple of times." In the notes of this post, I have elaborated on how this post was prompted by reading about a woman who worked as a fucking drone operator for the US military. I have also responded to people talking about child rapists.

I am really frustrated and annoyed by your "caveats" because they make no sense. I do not fucking understand what you people think I am saying with this post. Like, genuinely, what the fuck did you think I meant by this section:

I say a system and process because its not "oh the drone operator said they were sorry and felt bad so its all good now :)" there is no shortcut here. but it is absolutely necessary. no revolution is comprised of morally pure people. in many cases, the most devoted revolutionaries are the ones who know exactly what it is like on the other side.

Did you think I was just fucking around and smashing random keys when I wrote this? By "process" and "there is no shortcut" I meant "people who did the worst things don't need to accept they've done anything bad and don't need to accept that making amends means accepting a great amount of risk"? Is that what you think I meant?

Its not just y'all. Other people keep coming on this post and adding "caveats" because, as far as I can tell, y'all cannot see a person talking about restorative justice without immediately assuming that they don't understand that bad things require actual effort to amend. The point of this post is that it is necessary to have systems for people to make amends, that actually facilitate and incentivize people to do that hard work, rather than providing zero support or clear pathways to actually go about doing that.

Intersectionality, at it's core, asserts that identities can not be broken into what we see as their individual parts, in particular when discussing the oppression and prejudice a person faces. Identities are more than just the sum of their parts.

The theory was originally laid out by a black woman to explain her own oppression. In short, she claimed that her oppression as a black woman could not be simply explained as black oppression + woman oppression. She also experienced black woman oppression.

Now, the nuances of the situation are much more complex, but this is the very basic idea. You always have to account for a person's identity as a whole, and not just the individual parts.

Black women are not just "black" + "women"

Black men are not just "black" + "men"

Trans women are not just "trans" + "women"

Trans men are not just "trans" + "men"

You always have to consider the identity as a whole, which may mean there are non obvious aspects of the whole identity that are not readily explained by the sum of the individual parts.

That is the basic explanation. Now let's get into one particular application I think is very important, at least on Tumblr, because on tumblr it has become extremely controversial.

A consequence of intersectionality is that specific kinds of oppression cannot be divorced from maleness. A black man's oppression cannot be explained as "black" + "male" oppression. There are aspects of the oppression black men face that cannot be separated from their identity as a whole. Even if you believe "men" suffer no unique oppression, intersectionality means you can't deny the possibility that "black men" suffer oppression that cannot be divorced from them being men.

This application of intersectionality is fundamental and the application of intersectionality to black men has been accepted for basically as long as intersectionality has been around.

A similar application can be made to trans men.

Now if you don't agree with this model, sure. Im not going to say it is fine because I think you are wrong, but no social model is above criticism. What you can't do is claim that intersectionality is anything else. You either accept that aspects of oppression can be tied to maleness, or you do not accept intersectionality. There is no secret third thing. This is a fundamental consequence of intersectionality as a model.

I think it is important to note that intersectionality did not start as queer theory. The roots of the model are in the study of sexism and racism. This is black feminist theory. And to put a point on it, trans feminist theory has no business trying to warp intersectionality to fit preconceived ideas about how queer identities and queer oppression works.

I believe that twisting well established black feminist theory into an unrecognizable form and then stealing the credibility of that well established black feminist theory by labeling your new theory "intersectional" is racist. We do not get to borrow their credibility while spitting on their work.

more deliberation still to come, with a settlement in the works that caps fees, allows competitors to do business, and dissolves exclusive agreements ticketmaster has with certain companies. article says nothing has been decided for sure yet, and even once it is, it may take a while for consumers to notice any effects.

there is an ideal feminist subject (the thin white middle-class pretty gender-conforming-but-not-too-feminine cis perisex woman). this ideal feminist subject is who much of mainstream feminism has been build around protecting, supporting, defending, and theorizing on her experiences. she isn't real; she's an idea, a trope, a story used to ground feminism in a certain story. feminism uses a lot of stories in order to develop and communicate certain ideas & webs of ideas, which allow us to see the world differently, realize the different options we have to react to our experiences in the world, and connect with others to support one another and act collectively.

people who wish to engage in feminism narrate their experiences through feminist stories. this can be very useful, as it allows people to make sense of their experiences in a way that can actually empower them: there is an important difference between telling the story of "i got pregnant as a teen because i was a dumb slut, and i disappointed everyone" and telling the story of "i got pregnant as a teen because our sex ed was worthless and i didn't have a good understanding of consent and my boyfriend felt like he owned my body, and my community betrayed me because they held misogynistic beliefs about my body and my role in society."

but there are a lot of people who could seriously benefit from being able to apply those feminist stories to themselves, who cannot, because they struggle to narrate themselves as the feminist subject. this not only limits their ability to make sense of their experiences in an empowering way, but also has real material impacts. the ideal feminist subject is also the ideal feminist victim of domestic abuse, the ideal feminist survivor of date rape, the ideal feminist victim of the gender pay gap, the ideal feminist recipient of feminist support. if you can't fit yourself into these stories defined by the ideal feminist subject, you are far less likely to have your suffering recognized as real or urgent. resources that you may desperately need will not recognize you as a potential client. feminist movements to fight for social change will not consider how society needs to change for you to not suffer needlessly.

so many people re-narrate their experiences in order to present themselves as, in some vital way, close enough to the ideal feminist subject to count. people can take different tactics, but one of the most popular is emphasizing one's womanhood in order to counter-act the distance caused by being fat, non-white, lower-class, not conventionally attractive, gender non-conforming, trans or intersex. the narrative used often goes that feminism is for women, I am a woman, therefore feminism should include me. this isn't always successful, but it is one of the most influential, because feminism is centered around gender, it is most concerned with thinking about gender and people as gendered subjects. with all the words i listed above as describing the ideal feminist subject, the final word is not an adjective but a noun: "woman." the ideal feminist subject has many traits, but she is a woman.

trans women narrate themselves very similarly to other marginalized women, emphasizing that their identity as women is what allows them to step into the role of the feminist subject and use those stories and be integrated into feminism at large. trans women in particular can struggle with this process because "cis" (and "perisex") are fundamentally gendered (and sexed) terms, making them part of the same category as "woman," and so it is extremely hard to separate the ideal feminist subject's womanhood from her cisness and her perisexuality. we can see this in how, traditionally, these terms were not used at all; a woman was presumed to be a cis and perisex woman, so much so that "cis" and "perisex" didn't exist as defined concepts. transphobic feminists zero in on this to argue against trans women's inclusion. but, in popular strains of trans-inclusive feminism, gender identity is re-imagined as the location of womanhood (as opposed to the cis-perisex "female" body), which helps to de-couple cisness and perisexuality from womanhood.

but this is where feminism continually fails transmasculine and nonbinary people, and where transfeminism has continually disappointed. even if cisness and perisexuality are de-coupled from womanhood, they are still working behind the scenes to define it. you don't have to check those specific boxes, but you need to pass the vibe checks.

a trans man is systemically oppressed on the basis of gender, affected by misogyny and transphobia, and in need of the support and resources offered by feminism. but if the ideal feminist subject is, fundamentally, a woman, then he must narrate himself as a woman. and, crucially, even transfeminism rarely meaningfully questions the frameworks of oppositional sexism and exorsexism which define womanhood around being the opposite of, and excluding of, manhood. nonbinary people, even if they aren't men, are similarly excluded. even if someone identifies as a woman in some way, they can only re-narrate their experiences effectively if they downplay the parts of themself that aren't "woman." this also affects many trans women who, for a variety of reasons, are not comfortable or able or willing to re-narrate their experiences on the basis that their womanhood is just like cis women's.

and, even worse: the violence and misogyny experienced by trans men, by nonbinary people, by many other kinds of trans and GNC people, is fundamentally tied to their rejection of cis womanhood. yet they must try to narrate these experiences with misogyny as being fundamentally born from existing as a woman-as-defined-by-cisness. this creates an intolerable paradox which was well-explained by C. Jacob Hale in his 2009 essay "Tracing a Ghostly Memory in My Throat: Reflections on Ftm Feminist Voice and Agency":

Those of us who are dislocated from already given gender categories, both normative and nonnormative ones, are dislocated in that we cannot fully inhabit any of them. We place ourselves and are placed by others in the margins of any number of gender categories, never close to the paradigmatic core of any but also never falling fully outside all. [...] I do not fit the paradigms of any already given gender categories. I flit about the margins of each of these categories. Since some of these categories share unions with one another, I flit through overlapping border zones constituted by the margins of several gender categories. Flitting about the margins is not a refusal to own my location, nor is it valorization of gender play or gender fluidity. Flitting is a type of movement proper to ghosts: creatures abjected from full social existence who, instead, have only partial, limited social existence. For reasons as personal, various, and idiosyncratic as the personal, various, and idiosyncratic connections border zone inhabitants draw between our embodiments, self-identifications, and subjectivities, already given discourses offer us little else than indefinite sequences of indiscriminate erasure. Already given discourses may elide the specificities of those with firm locations within already given categories, but not to the same degree that they elide the specificities of the dislocated. Those of us who live in border zones constituted by the overlapping margins of categories do so because our embodiments and our subjectivities are abjected from social ontology: we cannot fit ourselves into extant categories without denying, erasing, or otherwise abjecting personally significant aspects of ourselves. The price of committing such violence against ourselves is too great, though our only other option is also very costly for the dislocated have fallen through the cracks in the structure of the gendered world. Having slipped off all the handholds we have ever tried to grasp, we have fallen between the cracks of language and life. Unintelligible to ourselves and to others, we are driven to search for new category terms, since category terms are the signal-flags of social ontology, and we desperately long to reenter the world.

this is the source of trans in-fighting within feminism. some trans men desperately try to use the idea of a "female body" to narrate themselves as a feminist subject and downplay gender identity (which will inevitably be used by cis-feminists to ignore their transmasculinity entirely, leaving them vulnerable to all kinds of abuse), while some trans women use woman-identity and downplay the body. nonbinary people, too, engage in this. the core issue here is that all trans people, in order to re-narrate themselves to get closer to the ideal feminist subject, must downplay their transness. transness implies the inter-mixing of different gendered experiencs, different sexed bodies. it implies the blurring and crumbling of a solid, objective, unifying identity as females or as women. so the trans community is pulled in various different directions, tearing us apart as we try to cut off different pieces of ourselves to justify to cis women why we deserve whatever scraps of allyship they are willing to give us.

the last thing anyone needs is fearmongering that makes it sound like lawmakers are so idiotic can't even, for example, ban CSAM without making it illegal to share ANY images online.

I have extremely bad news for you about our lawmakers.

This is NOT a slippery slope argument, it is an argument with very clear precedents and lots of evidence of harm done. There isn't dangerous stuff going on in tech right now, there has been dangerous stuff going on in tech since "tech" has existed.

SESTA/FOSTA, passed by lawmakers to prevent human trafficking, is why it's so easy to get trans women on tumblr banned for posting 'mature content'. It has also made human trafficking worse, made sex work more dangerous, and sanitized the internet to the point that it's difficult to post photos of classical sculptures or instructions on how to perform a breast self-exam on most platforms.

The DMCA, passed by lawmakers to protect copyright holders online, is frequently used to censor criticism, cover up reporting on corporate malfeasance, and prevent buyers from having true ownership of digital purchases.

Lawmakers are CONSTANTLY attempting to use "But this would protect children/prevent the sharing of CSAM" to attack Section 230, a legal provision that prevents platforms from being held liable for the content they host. The proposed changes lawmakers idiotically present actually would drastically erode your ability to post ANY images online, would not make anyone safer, and would further consolidate the power held by platforms like Google and Meta while making it harder for smaller online platforms to exist.

The original sin of all of this (in the US at least) is the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which was passed in 1986 to regulate charges and sentences for computer-based crime and has been used since to prosecute security researchers and activists, and has been responsible for tremendously disproportionate sentences levied against people charged with computer-related crimes.

The people who write and pass laws about computers and the internet don't understand computers or the internet. The people who advocate for these kinds of laws either don't anticipate the second-order consequences or anticipated the consequences and wanted fallout like the sanitation of the internet or the criminalization of downloading journal articles.

these are two entirely contradictory lines of logic, but they lead to the same conclusion. because the conclusion is the point. its a backformed theory of gender. people believe, for whatever reason, that "trans guys have it easier" is an objective fact, and then storytell an explanation for why that is that sounds right to them. and this isn't necessarily something that's done maliciously, which is key. its not about people twiddling their fingers and thinking about how to contribute to a massive conspiracy against transmascs. its about people just feeling, on a gut level, that trans guys must have it easier, by which they really mean, transmasculine suffering isn't socially visible, and it isn't natural for me to imagine it, therefore it must not exist; yet, trans suffering in general clearly exists, so there must be some reason that transmasculine suffering feels so abstract and immaterial to me and others.

even though the explanations are entirely flipped (one relies on male gender performance being highly policed and that affecting trans people assigned male more than those assigned female, the other relies on female gender performance being highly policed and that affecting trans people transitioning towards femininity more than those transitioning towards masculinity), they are both trying to take the model of "women suffer because they are women and men benefit because they are men" and contort it to explain transmasculine experiences.

this is why these explanations make very little sense when you really look at them. when you only have a hammer, everything looks like a nail; when you can only analyze gender through a cissexist lens, everything looks fundamentally cis.

cisfeminism struggles greatly to actually deal with social hatred for androgyny and intersexuality and transness, because you can make feminist arguments and feminist theory that can explain many (though clearly not all) women's experiences without ever questioning the binary.

to explain what i mean by "coerced":

i think doing things that are morally bad is also bad for the individual. people shouldn't be forced to do things in general, but its especially bad to force someone to do something morally bad. its also bad to coerce them into doing that. and its quite horrific for a system to embed within someone a worldview which habitually leads them to do bad things, and a social system which incentivizes people to do bad things.

this post is in part inspired by reading the book Dirty Work which talks about moral injury & people (largely marginalized people) who do work that is seen as morally "dirty" in society. and specifically the chapter on people who work with drones for the US military (in a variety of ways). one of the major figures was a woman who grew up in poverty and was terrified of dying that way, went to join the military to get to see the world, and ended up working a job requiring her to watch hours and hours of drone footage, including hours of people living their lives, their gruesome deaths, and their families trying to collect their body parts in the aftermath. she recounts how much this weighed on her psychologically and morally, but not only her fear of poverty but also being court-martialed or otherwise subject to punishment if she spoke out or did anything, and her anger at protestors who seemed to be largely middle-class women who directed their protests at individual workers like her. she eventually did become a whistle-blower and says she experienced backlash from the left as well as the right because of her job.

now, this was a difficult read for me. it can be frustrating to read a whole chapter on the suffering of drone operators when so many people in the US don't give the beginning of a fuck about the people who have been getting bombed for years. the trauma of entire countries doesn't outweigh the trauma of a single US soldier. how can we talk about her anger at women protesting drone warfare because it hurts her feelings when we are still having to protest drone warfare that destroys entire families?

and yet. i think that reaction is partially an attempt to avoid the discomfort of how fucked the situation is holistically. the woman clearly had internalized plenty of dehumanizing, imperialistic, racist, and likely Orientalist beliefs and values. but this was hardly something she consciously chose. its easy to say "never join the US military" when you are someone who 1. already had the time and chance to develop a sense of how evil the US military is (not everyone necessarily does) 2. was not and is not in the position of being 17 and worried you'll die of a fentanyl overdose in the next five years like multiple of your classmates and desperate for any opportunity out.

does it make her decision better morally? i don't think so. but why was it a decision she had to make? why did she have so few options? why did things feel so desperate? why did a certain decision seem better and more accessible than others? if we are going up the line of responsibility here, the reason this harmful, morally bad action took place at all is because of the system of US imperialism and capitalism.

the problem is, that answer does not give us A Person To Punish. which we, as people socialized into a worldview of punitive justice, have been taught to want. transformative justice isn't just switching to A Person To Fix, its directing our energy towards social change and collective thinking and acting. that doesn't ignore the individual, but it always sees the individual through a social lens. the ultimate goal is a system which incentivizes the morals we want to see just as much as the current one incentives individualism and authoritarianism and puritanism and imperialism.

i think the perspective that we are coerced, by social systems like imperialism, patriarchy, capitalism, white supremacy, etc. into acting immorally and harming others and ourselves, more naturally invites people to see their own racism, sexism, orientalism, classism, etc. as both morally bad and yet not a sign they are bad. it directly counters the idea that saying "the thing you did is racist" means "YOU are racist and EVIL and CONSCIOUSLY DESPISE PEOPLE OF COLOR"*; the point is that the thing you did is racist, and if you don't want to do racist things, then you have to unlearn the shit you were socialized into believing. "coerced" keeps in mind that there are people who benefit from keeping this status quo. if racism is evil, and white supremacist culture means everyone has internalized racist beliefs, that doesn't mean everyone is evil. it means we have all been coerced into participating in evil, and we are demanding an end to that coercion; that is (one form of) accountability.

this perspective can't exist alone, either. it must be paired with a devotion to the victims of these systems. this is why it is a process. the back-and-forth has to be put into action to get a balanced solution. what is best is what practically creates system change, and having process for (again, social) forgiveness is a practical necessity.

^ wanna add these tags to the post if you don't mind because this is a vital issue to restorative justice being restorative and just and not just a smokescreen for further violence, and I want to give my thoughts on how we might navigate this (pre-emptively sorry for the very long post incoming, I'm incapable of making a succinct point when it comes to this topic).

I don't think restorative justice should be thought of as a fundamentally white thing, frameworks of restorative justice built by white people are frequently shoddy and poorly thought out. The idea of restorative justice being "a brand new radical theory invented by white leftist intellectuals" turns it into a hypothetical that fundamentally emerges from European culture, when restorative justice was initially introduced to modern Europe through centuries-old existing practices of various Indigenous nations. Restorative justice has been done better, by Indigenous people in the Americas and around the world.

I include some quotes in this reblog of this post about the Wendat nation's traditional framework for justice (which is only one version of restorative justice, ofc). I also touch on the justice system of DAANES / Rojava, a modern autonomous administration in Syria which uses restorative justice. Rojava is a Kurdish term, and the Kurds are an Indigenous ethnic minority that has faced intense oppression throughout West Asia, and as a result their model for governance in Rojava is built around being explicitly multiethnic.

Notably, both the Wendat and Rojava systems of justice take into account gender in a way that I think is very important for not just gender but how restorative justice needs to deal with marginalization as a whole. In Rojava, any issue regarding women (especially issues of marriage or sexual violence) must have women involved in the justice process from start to finish. On an institutional level, there must be gender parity across systems, including the justice system, and women can seek recourse on the most basic level by going to their local Mala Jin (women's house) to get support from their community. The Mala Jin are required to be consulted in any legal issue concerning women. Similarly, in the Wendat nation and many other nations, women had their own independent councils which had authority over their own issues.

Obviously, gender and race are different issues. But one can easily imagine how "restorative justice" could be used to excuse gendered violence by having a bunch of men demand a woman who was abused by her husband forgive him and prevent divorce. This is why Rojava is modeled the way it is, on every level; ethnic minorities are treated similarly, having their own democratic organizations and positions in councils to ensure they have a collective voice. The (Kurdish, Assyrian, Yazidi, Arab) women of Rojava have meaningful power over their lives and social organization, and they make sure that restorative justice is built to work for marginalized groups, rather than simply assuming the system itself is just so inherently good and moral in theory that everything will work out if its kept gender/race/class neutral.

It's not just a matter of implementing a system and then expecting everyone's mindset to change. Both the Wendat and Rojava systems involve a certain culture that facilitates people engaging in these systems, and the Rojava Revolution has involved dedicated work to spread the political and philosophical framework that underlies its justice system and allow it to function. In cases where restorative justice utterly fails, its a lot of times the result of either a poorly-made framework, people lacking the theoretical/cultural understanding to use that framework properly, or both.

The models of the Wendat and Rojava come from cultures that were/are both communalist and anti-authoritarian. For many Indigenous nations, the idea that someone could be forced to obey a political leader, or even that a child should be forced to obey a parent, was ridiculous and unjust. Leaders had to be constantly generous and persuasive to get people to follow them, and people had the inherent right to refuse orders. That is a very different way of relating to people than in more authoritarian cultures, like most European cultures. So trying to just cut + paste that kind of justice system without adopting any other part of the culture or political framework is obviously going to fail. It is a very European-Enlightenment way of thinking to imagine that if you just build a system that sounds really good and moral in theory, then in practice you can act and think however you want and the system will always spit out good results because it just looks so good on paper (this video from The Alt-Right Playbook isn't really relevant to restorative justice, but it is where I first heard this cultural idea of "the system will Just Work, no matter how many bad ideas are in it!" & I think it explains why a lot of white leftist attempts at various things are shitty. People don't want to put in the effort to do good, they just want a system that lets them act however they want and still feel good).

Any restorative justice system worth its salt should preempt situations like the above. No victim who is marginalized should be in a position where they, alone, have to defend themselves against a group of people who do not share their marginalization, even if those people have good intentions. The system should be built specifically with that situation in mind, in order to ensure that no group is able to hoard the power and control what justice looks like. It should be a ground rule that if an incident involves people of a marginalized group, that the system has a way to ensure that group has authority over the proceedings. If the victim is a Black person, step one should be bringing in other Black people to support the victim and ensure that the victim as an individual, and the community as a whole, has not just a perfunctory voice but the power to dictate what restorative justice looks like in that situation.

If an attempt at restorative justice is not foundationally anti-racist and built to force white people to deal with discomfort and distress and social consequences for engaging in racism, it does not deserve respect. When cis/male/white/upper-class people are never made, in a justice system, to do any restorative acts that challenge the privileges they gain from those positions, the only clear end-goal of the process is the victim's forgiveness. And rather than that forgiveness being the natural result of a process that amends the harm done to them, the whole process collapses into "how fast can we get this person to shut up about what they went through?" because the process has been built for the comfort of the offenders, not for restoring harmony in the community to ensure the well-being of all its members. Good restorative justice sees the reform of offenders as a practical way of establishing that safety and harmony for everyone; if it didn't demand anything from the offenders, it would be completely inept. In one of those quotes in that post I linked, the restorative justice process is explicitly meant as an alternative for the victim('s family) demanding violent retribution, with the idea being "if they are not satisfied through restoration, they will demand blood and probably take matters into their own hands, so our restoration system needs to be genuinely effective to keep the peace." There was no assumption that the victim would just have to get whatever the community decides they get and have to deal with it (which ties back to the cultural anti-authoritarianism).

Verifying a workers’ income for government health insurance, and Equifax’s capture of that function, is just one illustrative component of the Rube Goldberg machine that comprises America’s rigorously means-tested safety net and its vulnerability to corporate capture. Complex eligibility rules and administrative hurdles to determine who deserves coverage and who does not are fractured across government agencies and jurisdictions. Many research studies, magazine spreads, and books have documented how this complexity keeps millions of eligible people from accessing billions of dollars in benefits they are entitled to – the unemployed are locked out of their unemployment insurance, the uninsured are never enrolled in their health coverage, and the hungry are denied food assistance. Vice President Harris’ announcement of “a student loan debt forgiveness program for Pell Grant recipients who start a business that operates for three years in disadvantaged communities” is perhaps the best recent caricature of how increasingly complex eligibility rules have failed to deliver for millions of Americans. And this labyrinth of eligibility rules doesn’t just fail the intended beneficiaries – the administrative complexity they create presents an enormous opportunity for profit by government contractors. After the COVID-19 Public Health Emergency was ended by Congress in 2023, I led a government team at the United States Digital Service to help fix state Medicaid systems that had fallen into crisis. As we rushed to put out fires in Red and Blue states alike we encountered the same problem – entrenched government contractors like Deloitte had charged millions to build error–prone systems that state governments had no capacity to fix. Billing by the hour, growing the complexity and incomprehensibility of these systems proved profitable. Changes that my team could make in minutes were quoted as requiring hundreds of billable hours. When we discovered that nearly 500,000 children had lost their health coverage improperly because of software errors, many system contractors were painfully slow to reinstate coverage for those children and fix the errors.

[...]

Again, new work requirements for Medicaid highlight the profits to be made from adding complexity to the safety net. Since Georgia implemented work requirements in 2020, they have spent twice as much on Deloitte consultants and administrative costs as on healthcare for people. As the other 55 states and territories are now forced to join Georgia and implement new work requirements, millions will lose their healthcare and Deloitte will cash in.

large language model ai like Claude and chat-gpt has been taking up all the attention around discussions of AI technology, but there are other kinds of AI too, that can't be understood by the discussion of LLMs.

Maven is an example of a technology that uses AI that is not large language model AI. it's a tool made by Palantir for the US military to conduct operations more "efficiently." He cites that the volume of strike coordination decisions that took two thousand people during the war in Iraq in 2003 can now be done with 20 people using Maven.

Maven is the tool being used right now to bomb Iran.

Baker goes into some detail about the history of how making bombing decisions more quickly became a priority of the US military, and criticizes how prioritizing speed means de-prioritizing anything that might slow those decisions down, like checking information for accuracy, or checking whether it was a good idea to bomb at all.

"The Feds Want to Make It Illegal to Even Possess an Anarchist Zine"

"Daniel Sanchez is facing federal charges for what free speech advocates say is a clear attack on the First Amendment."

By Seth Stern

November 23 2025, 6:00 a.m.