starcat

MY HOME IS ON THE LIST/LIKELY TO BE TARGETED, WHAT CAN I DO?

* it may bring you peace of mind to have a go-bag ready, just in case. A go-bag is a bag with everything in it that you need to get out a volatile situation quickly. Any bag that can be secured (buttoned or zipped) will do. In your go-bag, you should include;

- identifying documents; passport/driver’s license/asylum card/ILR certificate/British Residency permit card

- Wallet and/or banking books

- A spare charger & cable and/or a power bank

- any shelf-stable medication (tablets, inhalers etc.) if you are on medication that needs to be refrigerated, leave it in the fridge until you have to leave

- Sanitary items; toothbrush, toothpaste, sanitary pads & tampons, deodorant. If you have very young children with you, you may also want to take your nappy bag.

* If you have to leave, a go-bag is a convenient way to ensure you have everything of importance with you.

* If you are being supported by an asylum seekers or refugee charity, or are a member of a gurdwara/temple, mosque, synagogue or church, reach out to your religious leaders. They may be able to provide direct support, or put you in contact with organisations or other congregants who can help. If you are friendly with your neighbours, it may be worth contacting them too.

* IN THE EVENT THAT “PROTESTORS” DO COME TO YOUR HOUSE, CALL 999 IMMEDIATELY, AND FOLLOW ANY INSTRUCTIONS THEY GIVE YOU. MOVE AWAY FROM ANY WINDOWS. DO NOT OPEN YOUR DOOR UNLESS INSTRUCTED TO DO SO BY EMERGENCY SERVICES.

I’M AN INTERNATIONAL STUDENT/CARE WORKER/NHS WORKER, WHAT SHOULD I DO?

* Contact your student welfare office/NHS Trust/agency for advice, support and referral to organisations that may be able to provide assistance

* if you live in or commute through an area that is likely to be targeted, contact your lecturers and your faculty to find out whether remote study is possible; if you work in care or as part of the NHS, find out if it is possible to change shifts.

* If it would provide peace of mind, prepare a go-bag as listed above

* Reach out to your the uni society or student’s organisation for international students or students of specific ethnic origin; they may be able to provide you with direction to resources and peer support. If your university has a Marxist or Socialist society, reach out to them for mutual aid with a travel buddy etc., for getting to and from your place of study/work

* If you are a member of a gurdwara/temple, mosque, synagogue or church, reach out to your religious leaders. They may be able to provide direct support, or put you in contact with organisations or other congregants who can help.

* If you are friendly with your neighbours, it may be worth contacting them too for assistance with travel to & from work.

* Report any racism or racialised violence you are subjected to. NHS staff have a right to refuse to treat patients who harass, abuse, threaten or insult them; if a patient is racist to you, where possible, ask another member of staff to take over their care.

PERSONAL SAFETY:

* do not leave your home unless strictly necessary. If it is necessary to leave, don’t do it alone.

* use NextDoor, WhatsApp, social media and word of mouth to avoid commuting through “protestor” road blocks, areas of active conflict etc.,

* When travelling, use Share My Location or Life360, and keep at least two people aware of your expected time of arrival at your destination with instructions to contact the police if you do not let them know you’ve made it safely

* do not directly confront any individuals involved, or allow them to bait you into becoming confrontational

* only record if it is safe. Do not record individuals directly/from up close

* Do not directly intervene. If you see violence occurring, contact emergency services and if safe to do so, record what’s happening.

ALLYSHIP & HOW TO HELP:

* if you have neighbours, friends, coworkers or acquaintances form targeted communities, reach out to them. Ask them what you can do to help them feel safe.

* If you live in an area likely to be targeted, reach out to any vulnerable people you know. If safe and possible, offer to let them shelter with you in the event they need to leave home

* If you see any incitement to violence online screenshot it; it may prove useful in the event of individual “protesters” being prosecuted

* If you see any specific areas being discussed as targets, alert anyone you know at risk in the area

* Reach out to local refugee & asylum seekers’ organisations, to organisations supporting foreign national care & healthcare workers, and to churches, mosques, gurdwaras; they may be looking for short term assistance in helping to provide for vulnerable members of their community

CHARITABLE ORGANISATIONS FOR ASSISTANCE & TO SUPPORT:

* NASC Ireland; refugee & asylum seeker charity

* Doras.org; migrant, stateless persons, refugee and asylum seeker rights advocates

* Jesuit Refugee Service; religious refugee & asylum seekers charity

* Irish Refugee Council; supporting stateless displaced persons & refugees in NI & ROI

* International Student’s House (IE & UK WIDE): provides hardship funding and help to international students

* PathFinder (UK WIDE); supports international students

* Care International (GLOBAL); global carer’s charity

* Choose Love (IE & UK WIDE); charitable organisation supporting refugees and asylum seekers

* Praxis UK (UK WIDE); supporting refugees & asylum seekers

* The Runnymede Trust (IE & UK WIDE); antiracism education charity

* Migrant’s Rights Network (IE & UK WIDE); advocacy and support for migrants and refugees

* ShareTheMeal (GLOBAL); providing meals for refugees and those fleeing conflict globally

* Amnesty (IRELAND, UK & WORLDWIDE); human rights NGO

Shift of power~

When a client of mine tells me that he became abusive because he lost control of himself, I ask him why he didn’t do something even worse. For example, I might say, “You called her a fucking whore, you grabbed the phone out of her hand and whipped it across the room, and then you gave her a shove and she fell down. There she was at your feet, where it would have been easy to kick her in the head. Now, you have just finished telling me that you were ‘totally out of control’ at that time, but you didn’t kick her. What stopped you?” And the client can always give me a reason. Here are some common explanations:

“I wouldn’t want to cause her a serious injury.”

“I realized one of the children was watching.”

“I was afraid someone would call the police.”

“I could kill her if I did that.”

“The fight was getting loud, and I was afraid neighbors would hear.”

And the most frequent response of all:

“Jesus, I wouldn’t do that. I would never do something like that to her.”

The response that I almost never heard—I remember hearing it twice in fifteen years—was: “I don’t know.”

These ready answers strip the cover off of my clients’ loss-of-control excuse. While a man is on an abusive rampage, verbally or physically, his mind maintains awareness of a number of questions: “Am I doing something that other people could find out about, so it could make me look bad? Am I doing anything that could get me in legal trouble? Could I get hurt myself? Am I doing anything that I myself consider too cruel, gross, or violent?”

@yellowjacketsnetwork event 01: dynamics

Travis and Javi Martinez

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!

tai and shauna were the only ones who took shauna's pregnancy seriously- or at least understood the reality of it. partially because tai was the first to know, she helped shauna with the attempted abortion, she was the first that shauna confided in. they treat the pregnancy with much more gravity than the other characters, because they know how fucking dangerous and terrifying it is for shauna, to give birth in the wilderness with no medical care, no doctors, a rapidly dwindling food supply.

tai and shauna (and nat) are also the ones who struggle the most after eating jackie. tai because her other self took over in that moment, so on some level she has no idea what she's done until afterwards. shauna because they ate jackie, her best friend, the person she loved, hated, and whose death she caused.

for coach ben to look down on them, treat them like uncontrollable monsters who would turn on him and eat him next, to talk as if he's better than them for abstaining... yeah. i can see why tai and shauna would be angry. does he think they wanted this? to be driven to this? does he think they liked it? and the fact that, on some level, they did like it, they dont feel as bad as they probably should.... coach ben, like jackie, is the voice of judgement that they absolutely dont need. what right does he have to judge them?

because, coming back to shauna's pregnancy, coach ben may have had no clue what to do for her, or been able to help in any way, but he was the only adult figure that they had. to him, they didnt listen to him anymore, they didnt see him as an authority figure or value his opinion, but the yellowjackets still care about him, looking to him for guidance and reassurance. theyre still just kids. scared, terrified, unsure kids, one of whom is about to go through an incredibly traumatic birth, so they look to coach for something, anything... and he walks away. to the only room with a real bed, which (in my opinion) he could have offered to shauna during her last few months of pregnancy. instead, ben separates himself from the yellowjackets almost completely. shauna gives birth with her only help being teenagers who have no idea what theyre doing, but at least theyre doing something.

its easy for tai and shauna to hate coach ben. to blame him for the fire. him disappearing right when javi dies and they eat him is obviously no coincidence. and his obvious disgust, his morally superior attitude, the fact that he didnt care enough to even try and help shauna when she was in labour, and now javi's death? why wouldn't he try and kill them? why wouldnt he try and take them all out in one go? they're monsters. thats what he thinks anyway.

never forget that tai tried to give shauna an abortion. where coach ben left her alone to give birth with her teammates, tai literally attempted to save her life before it could get to that point despite having just watched the same video as ben. tai, despite having no resources and extremely limited knowledge, tried her fucking best to save her friend. tai went on the rescue mission that maimed van because she wanted to help shauna.

tai's relationship with denial is fascinating and when she finally submits to simply *hoping* that her best friend is going to make it out alive, she's still trying to save her because she *has* to make it out of there, then there's coach ben who has no hope at all. who's resigned himself to dying slow with these teenage girls at that point. to watching shauna and her baby die because how the fuck is he going to change anything. who never pretended to be excited for shauna's pregnancy because he knows how it's going to end and maybe tai does too but she can at least put on a fucking smile for her friends making baby shower gifts in the meantime. she's not fucking giving up on them.

it's not a hot take to say that the mass amnesia about fiberwork is linked to the belittlement of women's work in geneal, but i do think there's a special kind of illusion that is cast by "cooking, cleaning, and taking care of the children." you hear that and think "well i cook and clean and take care of children (or i know someone who does) and i have a sense of how much work that is" and you know of course that cooking and cleaning were more laborious before modern technology, but still, you have a ballpark estimate you think, when in fact you are drastically underestimating the work load.

“That’s not a good translation. The word we would use today, to convey the same idea, is technology.”