A Sense of Doubt blog post #4134 - SoD Reprint of 1573 from 2019 - The Cult of Outrage

A Sense of Doubt blog post #4134 - SoD Reprint of 1573 from 2019 - The Cult of Outrage

Just this reprint, and I had to fix an image.

Seems time for this message again as the national outrage is a bit out of control on some topics, though not on others.

LOW POWER MODE: I sometimes put the blog in what I call LOW POWER MODE. If you see this note, the blog is operating like a sleeping computer, maintaining static memory, but making no new computations. If I am in low power mode, it's because I do not have time to do much that's inventive, original, or even substantive on the blog. This means I am posting straight shares, limited content posts, reprints, often something qualifying for the THAT ONE THING category and other easy to make posts to keep me daily. That's the deal. Thanks for reading.

BLOG VACATION #1 - 2026 - Taking a blog vacation for a couple of weeks, until at least June 26th, 2026. Mostly reprints. A few simple shares (not that simple shares are out of the norm) and THAT ONE THING. Need time for other things.

Link to the original post I am reprinting below:

Tuesday, June 11, 2019

A Sense of Doubt blog post #1573 - Cult of Outrage

A Sense of Doubt blog post #1573 - Cult of Outrage

I have always said that rape jokes are not funny. This one isn't either, but it's also not terribly offensive. It's unfortunate, but it's more thoughtless than endemic of misogyny.

That said, the follow up article on the possibility that as many men are sexually assaulted as women per year is startling, especially given how prison statistics affect the numbers.

This post has been hanging around in my queue for years, though not quite five years.

http://issuehawk.com/patton/2014/06/24/cult-of-outrage-brittany-furlan-and-the-rape-joke-that-may-have-been-in-poor-taste-or-genius.html
Cult of Outrage: Brittany Furlan and the Rape Joke That Was Either In Poor Taste or Genius

• By: Joshua M Patton
   
• June 24, 2014
   
• Articles, Uncategorized
   
• 0 Comments

Read more at https://issuehawk.com/patton/2014/06/24/cult-of-outrage-brittany-furlan-and-the-rape-joke-that-may-have-been-in-poor-taste-or-genius.html#5VfaeemeLHSIcHFP.99

Brittany Furlan is a comedian who found her fanbase on the social network Vine, shooting and starring in seven second videos. Furlan and a number of other “vine famous” people she often films with have made their names with irreverent comedy, often with little context.

So Furlan was working the red carpet with Lauren Elizabeth (who found her fame on YouTube) and interviewing some handsome actor from a soap opera that is somehow still on the air. After generally fawning over his handsomeness and making suggestive jokes about “backstage” Furlan ended the interview by saying “Let’s get you away from us before we rape you.”

And cue Twitter outrage. According to Mediaite.com, not only were people actually watching the red carpet for the Daytime Emmys but some of them were actually willing to admit it by tweeting their disgust for Furlan’s joke.

Hey #daytimeemmys maybe hire some red carpet "hosts" w a little less black and rape jokes next year. These girls have the verbal runs.

— Brandon Barash (@BrandonBarash) June 22, 2014

Most notably, some other actor from the same soap opera (there can’t be more than one still on, right?) tweeted, “Hey #daytimeemmys maybe hire some red carpet “hosts” [with] a little less black and rape jokes next year. These girls have the verbal runs.

For fans of Furlan’s previous work, the edginess doesn’t come as much of a surprise. Yet is it fair to give more famous comedians who have done “questionable” material in the past a pass, but excoriate Furlan? Was her joke tasteless or was she cleverly subverting traditional stereotypes? The immediacy of Twitter doesn’t allow much time for reflection.

Maybe this wasn’t a high-minded bit that sought to subvert the traditional male-on-female violence paradigm (although, you could argue that it does that if only inadvertently), but an off-the-cuff remark that was, at worst, in poor taste. Yet, the outrage machine loves victims like Furlan, because while Patton Oswalt can take time off from social media without negatively impacting his career, a comedian like Furlan cannot.

While it is remarkably well-intentioned, as always the outrage is misplaced. Yes, Furlan’s joke played on the old stereotype that rape happens when someone “gets too excited” about how the victim looks. The fact that a woman saying that to a man is noticed this way, suggests that perhaps the stereotype that men are always the perpetrators and women always the victims is falling out of fashion.

Yet “taking down” Furlan neither advances the cause nor does anything to help the actual victims who are being let down by the system. Of course, trashing a comedian – especially one who is not an established brand – is far easier than addressing the substantive problems affecting rape survivors.

Instead, activists of all stripes seek to imbue “their word” with the same kind of fearful power as the name of the main villain in Harry Potter. Spoiler warning, but at one point the eponymous character tells his friends that by referring to the villain as “Voldemort” rather than “You-know-who” gives him an added power he doesn’t really have. That is what is happening with words today. People hear “rape” and regardless of the context, fire off their outrage into the ether.

Rape is a serious social problem across the world and one that is not likely to go away because of some miracle legislation or great awakening in society (although one can hope). Hiding the word away, especially absent of context, will make it easier for society to forget about the real problem and take satisfaction in the false victory of “banning” the word.

Hashtag activism isn’t always lazy and unproductive, but this kind almost always is.

https://latest.com/2014/04/new-study-finds-men-as-likely-to-be-victims-of-rape-as-women/

A new study seeks to challenge the way Americans think about rape specifically that men are the perpetrators and that women are the victims. In an essay for Slate, Hanna Rosin details a new study by Lara Stemple and Ilan Meyer which shows that “the rates of nonconsensual sexual contact is basically equalized, with 1.270 million women and 1.267 million men claiming to be victims of sexual violence.”


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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 1906.11 - 10:10
- Days ago = 1438 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2606.12 - 10:10

- Days ago: MOM = 3998 days ago & DAD = 652 days ago

- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I post Hey Mom blog entries on special occasions. I post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day, and now I have a second count for Days since my Dad died on August 28, 2024. I am now in the same time zone as Google! So, when I post at 10:10 a.m. PDT to coincide with the time of Mom's death, I am now actually posting late, so it's really 1:10 p.m. EDT. But I will continue to use the time stamp of 10:10 a.m. to remember the time of her death and sometimes 13:40 EDT for the time of Dad's death. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.

A Sense of Doubt blog post #3223 - Recent Crimethinc Newsletters - Fall 2023

 

A Sense of Doubt blog post #3223 - Recent Crimethinc Newsletters - Fall 2023

Back when we worked together on a class at WMU, my good friend Ryan Walters gave me a copy of the classic Crimethinc book: Days of War-Nights of Love-Crimethinc for Beginners.

I have read it many times, and I have been planning to feature parts of it on this blog for sometime. Maybe in 2024.

And so, I am excited that Crimethinc now has newsletters, which I have featured on this blog before.

In fact, I have published three Crimethinc or Crimethinc-related posts (the related one is the one on Antifa).

So, here is a fourth and the second newsletter collection.

In this series of four newsletters, going back to May 2023 and up to last month (November), you will learn many things, such as Elon Musk himself had the Crimethinc account (Chad Loder) banned from X-Twitter.

There’s some good analysis of Israel consolidating authoritarian power long before the Hamas attacks of October 7th.

There’s lots of other news from around the world of activists resisting regimes, capitalism, murder, rights-denial, and more. Anarchists, progressives, and all those who oppose fascism unite in variety of causes tracked by Crimethinc.

YOU CAN’T KILL AN IDEA.

The last newsletter directly addresses the Gaza slaughter that’s taking place. Over 13,000 Palestinians killed, almost half of which are children.

Israel has launched more strikes on Gaza (22,000+) than nay in modern warfare, more than the U.S. launched against Afghanistan and Iraq combined in the history of those conflicts.

Great reading here.

Thanks for tuning in.

MY PREVIOUS POSTS

Sunday, February 23, 2020
A Sense of Doubt blog post #1832 - Crimethinc: Seduced by the Image of Reality

Wednesday, December 1, 2021
A Sense of Doubt blog post ##2479 - Why is opposing fascism a bad thing? What is Antifa and correcting the record against the scapegoating from the GOPQ

Tuesday, April 11, 2023
A Sense of Doubt blog post #2975 - Merry Crisis and Happy New Fear - CrimethInc Newsletters

May 11, 2023

A Bulletin from the CrimethInc. ex-Workers Collective Greetings, comrades! We’re eager to update you about our activities over the past two months.   Remember, everything we do is the fruit of volunteer labor. If you want to support us, the best thing you can do is to undertake similar projects yourself. You could also sign up to donate to us. Updates to Our Store Since last you heard from us, we’ve printed another 100,000 copies of our classic sticker, “Immigrants Welcome,” which you can order here.   We’ve also reprinted one of our books, The Russian Counterrevolution, exploring how the Bolsheviks usurped the Russian Revolution and how that impacted anti-capitalist movements across the 20th century. You can order it here!   Also, while supplies last, we still have a few damaged copies of old issues of Rolling Thunder available here. Hurry to fill out your archives! New Articles Speaking of Russia, last week, we published a eulogy for Dmitry Petrov, a Russian anarchist killed fighting in Ukraine. We trace his activities across two decades, through clandestine actions, public organizing, and publishing. The resulting narrative illuminates the descent into tyranny that has taken place in Russia and the brave things that anarchists have done to resist.    Just as our last email was hitting the wires, a powerful movement took off in France against Macron’s unpopular neoliberal reforms. In our follow-up text, “France in Flames,” we explored the violence with which police reacted, especially in Sainte-Soline.   At the same time, a protest movement emerged in Israel in response to prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu attempting to consolidate power. We published an analysis from our correspondent in the region showing how the crisis emerged out of a conflict between competing elites and colonial models and describing the impact on Palestinians.   In Atlanta, abolitionists are fighting to defend a forest that the city government wants to replace with a police training compound. Georgia State Troopers murdered a forest defender named Tortuguita in January; the authorities finally released the autopsy results. We analyzed them in this article.   As fascists and other bigots renew their assault on queer and trans people, there is an urgent need for anarchist coordination to defend gender self-determination. In this context, we interviewed participants in the original Bash Back! network, who have called for a convergence in September 2023.   On April 15, we observed Steal Something from Work day with a text about whistleblowing, which is also a kind of workplace theft. Ongoing Stories In Sudan, a grisly war has broken out between the reigning military dictatorship and the paramilitary organization that has repeatedly carried out massacres to keep it in power. We have been communicating with anarchists there since the end of 2021. The situation there is horrific now; the only ray of light has been the mutual aid efforts organized by the same networks that previously were fighting to overthrow the dictatorship. Like the war in Ukraine, the whole situation underscores the gruesome consequences that ensue when our society becomes militarized. It also confirms that even if we don’t succeed in toppling our oppressors, our resistance movements are our best hope for survival.   On April 19, Alfredo Cospito ended his incredible 180-day hunger strike. This is bittersweet, as he sustained permanent damage after so much time without sustenance, but his hunger strike exerted considerable pressure against the solitary confinement regime of the Italian prison system. We honor his courage and we are grateful that he is still among the living. New Zines and Podcasts In addition to all these articles, over the past two months, we have prepared three new zines:  The Fight for Gender Self-Determination: Confronting the Assault on Trans People How to Survive a Felony Trial Atlanta Police and Georgia State Patrol Are Guilty of Murder   And three new episodes of our podcast: #92: The Bitter Harvest of Colonialism in Israel #93: France in Flames: The Movement Against Macron's Pension Reform #94: The Uprising in Peru  CrimethInc. in 14 Languages Thanks to the participation of our comrades around the world, over the past two months alone, we have published translations in a variety of languages including Spanish, French, Russian, Polish, Bulgarian, Japanese, Kurdish, Turkish, German, Dutch, Italian, Portuguese, and Greek.   In addition, we’ve published some of our zines in Spanish and a poster in Polish.   If you can help us translate into any language, please get in touch. Sometimes Anti-Social, Always Anti-Media In the wake of our ban from Twitter at the order of Elon Musk, directed by a well-known fascist troll, we’ve been experimenting with a variety of other platforms, including Mastodon, Telegram, and Reddit. The latest addition to this list is Bluesky, an effort to develop a decentralized social network protocol based on the Twitter model. If you can get an elusive Bluesky invite code, please follow us there. Hot Tips As we do every May, we urge you to track down a copy of this year's edition of Ron Sakolsky's anarcho-surrealist zine, The Oystercatcher. This issue includes an interview with Ben Morea of Up Against the Wall Motherfucker, a narrative from Weelaunee Forest in Atlanta, a historical text about the intersections between the first generation of French surrealists and the anarchists of their time, a book review of The History of Ignored Surrealism, and more. "Surrealism is the bullet in the chamber of love. Surrealism is the pincushion of desire. Surrealism is the daybreak of the Marvelous." Speaking of Weelaunee Forest, participants in the movement to defend the forest in Atlanta have announced another week of action to take place June 24 through July 1. “As species go extinct by the thousand, as hurricanes and forest fires and other disasters exacerbated by climate change tear through your community, when you find yourself living in a concrete wasteland, remember, none of this was inevitable. These tragedies are the direct consequence of the decisions of self-seeking politicians, corporate profiteers, and armed mercenaries: specific individuals who have names and addresses. They are making the earth uninhabitable in pursuit of personal gain, imposing the consequences on the rest of us. We owe it to the future of all living things to stop them.” Finally, Catharsis (a hardcore punk band whose records we have released) will be touring in Europe from June 30 through July 9. You can download their music here for free, along with practically all of the other records we have released over the years. July 5th, 2023

A Bulletin from the CrimethInc. ex-Workers Collective

Greetings friends! Since last we wrote you, there have been new upheavals in Russia and France, and we’ve published several new articles offering background and on-the-ground reports.

Last week, a veritable uprising broke out in France in response to the murder of 17-year-old Nahel Merzouk. In this article, participants in the uprising explain it in the context of anti-racist and anti-colonial struggles in France dating back to the 1970s, and discuss the relationship of this uprising to the social movements of the past two decades. In March, we reported on the previous round of protests in France, during which police nearly killed several people. One of them, Serge, remained in a coma for weeks after French police shot him in the head with a grenade in Sainte-Soline on March 25, 2023. Thankfully, Serge has recovered enough to release a message, which we have translated and published here. In response to the same protest during which police grievously injured Serge and many other demonstrators, French interior minister Gérald Darmanin announced the state-ordered dissolution of the movement Soulevements de la Terre [“Uprisings of the Earth”] and had 18 people arrested on accusations of association with it. As usual, the state endangers the lives of those it supposedly protects, blames the victims of its attacks, and then sets out to silence the survivors. Please read this statement of solidarity with Soulevements de la Terre.

At the end of June, Yevgeny Prigozhin led his private military company Wagner in a short-lived mutiny against the Russian government. We immediately translated three statements about the mutiny from anarchist groups in Russia: the Movement of Irkutsk Anarchists, the Combat Organization of Anarcho-Communists, and the editorial collective behind Autonomous Action. Meanwhile, in the United States—defying scores of frivolous charges of “domestic terrorism,” activists and community members in Atlanta, Georgia just completed their sixth week of action against the proposed Cop City police militarization facility. The authorities intent to build Cop City despite popular opposition; the movement is determined to stop them despite unprecedented repression.   We have published an analysis exploring the strategic challenges facing the movement to stop Cop City, chronicling the actions of the movement and the reactions of the authorities throughout 2023. This picks up where our earlier articles detailing the history of the movement left off.

There is also a zine version of "Living in an Earthquake," which you can download here. Feel free to print these out and distribute them! In setting out to stop the militarization of police, people in Atlanta are taking on an institution that has become increasingly central to governance all around the world, soaking up more and more resources of society as a whole. From Atlanta to France—abolish the police!

If you want to be informed when translations of our texts appear on our site in languages other than English, those are announced on our Telegram channel. You can subscribe here.   For example, our collection of Russian anarchist responses to the failed Wagner mutiny is available in ten languages—English, Russian, Bulgarian, Polish, Czech, German, Greek, Italian, Portuguese, and French. You can see all the material we have available in each of the 36 languages available on our site here.

In case you missed it—to celebrate the reprint of our classic gender poster, we also printed a remix of the poster, along with an essay discussing the way that popular conceptions of gender—and the reactionary violence directed against them—have shifted over the past twenty years.   Our British comrades have made an A2 format printing of the gender poster remix. The proceeds will be divided between the Anarchist Federation's "HRT for all and for free" fundraiser and the Trans Liberation Front, a Bristol-based direct action group in support of trans, intersex, and GNC people. If you are in the UK, you can order them here.   For now, everyone who orders from our online store will also receive a sticker version of the new poster.

Finally, in the department of capitalists admitting we were right all along… On the 24th anniversary of the international anti-capitalist mobilization of June 18, 1999, the headlining article in the New York Times openly declared what we have been saying for a quarter of a century: neoliberal globalization creates catastrophic wealth inequalities, wrecking the biosphere and generating extreme-right nationalism. If you want to read our analysis of modern capitalism rather than depending on corporate journalists for your understanding of exploitation, you could start with our book, Work.

Buy Here

September 14th, 2023

Greetings and felicitations! We’re back from our summer travels and eager to catch up with you!!! First, if you are a student returning to class for the fall, form an anarchist student organization! We’ll gladly send you outreach material in bulk. For inspiration and ideas, you can read about how one anarchist student organization got going here. The RICO Case in Atlanta and the Fight to #StopCopCity At the beginning of this month, the Georgia Attorney General brought RICO charges against 61 people accused of protesting against the construction of Cop City, a planned police militarization facility. The indictment is an attempt to portray the entire movement as a criminal conspiracy. Three people central to this case are being accused of “money laundering” for providing legal support to previous arrestees.   By indiscriminately lumping together scores of arrestees, many of whom have never met, into a fabricated conspiracy case, the prosecutors aim to criminalize protest itself. This is a case of politically driven repression aimed at suppressing all forms of activism and dissent, in the style of authoritarian despots like Vladimir Putin.   A surprising part of the text of the indictment is given over to painting a picture of the defendants as anarchists who engage in mutual aid, read zines about how to address the media, and disapprove of police violence. The prosecutors hope that this smear campaign will goad jurors into declaring the defendants guilty despite the shortage of concrete evidence. For background on the fight to stop Cop City, you could consult the most recent installment of our ongoing chronology of the movement.   After the announcement of the RICO charges, the Atlanta city government made the outrageous decision to reject a petition signed by over 100,000 locals demanding a referendum on whether to build Cop City. Now participants in the movement are calling for a mass action November 10-13 to shut down construction. Reports from Saint-Imier Over the summer, some of us joined 5000 other anarchists from around the world at an anarchist gathering in Saint-Imier, Switzerland. We’ve published a full report including background on the historical events that the gathering commemorated and accounts and appraisals from attendees from half a dozen different countries. We followed up that coverage with a narrative exploring the political practices and discourse around gender and sexuality during the gathering in Saint-Imier and in the contemporary anarchist movement at large. Other News from Europe In July, 2023, the Greek government evicted a Kurdish refugee camp in Greece. The decades-old camp had served as an important center of organizing in southeastern Europe. In this analysis, Beja Protner shows how this operation connects Turkeys’ war on Kurdish people, the Greek government’s war on autonomous spaces, and the European Union’s war on migrants. Following up on our earlier coverage of the revolt in France sparked by the murder of 17-year-old Nahel Merzouk, we published “Learning from the Flames,” a reflection on the series of powerful movements that have rocked France over the past decade and what has prevented them from bringing about revolutionary transformation thus far. You Still Can’t Kill an Idea Our comrades at Municipal Adhesives are reprinting the sticker they published in solidarity with us after Elon Musk banned us from Twitter. You can order these here. Our comrades from Black Mosquito have done a European printing, as well, which is available here. Speaking of that particular despicable billionaire, last month, Musk made his agenda more explicit by amplifying an openly anti-Semitic campaign to ban the Anti-Defamation League from the platform formerly known as Twitter. Musk is trying to blame declining advertising sales on Jewish people; in fact, the fault is his alone, for going out of his way to welcome self-declared Nazis back to the platform while banning or suppressing the users who originally made Twitter interesting.   As long as there are billionaires, they will be able to purchase and destroy the technologies we depend on for information. This is just one of the many reasons we seek to abolish capitalism—to bring about a world in which narcissistic bigots cannot monopolize control of any communications platform. In the meantime, we urge you to shift from corporate social media platforms to comparatively horizontal communications technologies.   You can follow us on Mastodon, on Bluesky, and on Telegram. If you want to keep up with our publications in languages other than English, we announce those on our Telegram channel.   Speaking of which, we’re still seeking assistance translating our articles! If you can help, please contact us! Events This Fall! Last weekend, we participated in the Bash Back convergence in Chicago. This coming weekend, we will be tabling at the New York City Anarchist Book Fair, and the first weekend in October, we will table at the Bay Area Anarchist Book Fair. If you want to invite us to participate in an event anywhere in the world, contact us. Print Material We’ve added another zine to our zine library—our classic introduction, A Civilian’s Guide to Direct Action. We’ve also designed a zine version of our coverage of the RICO case so you can distribute it in your community. Please print these out and share them: In Memory of Active Distribution has published a book version of our eulogy for the Russian anarchist Dmitry Petrov. Dmitry organized against the autocratic government of Russia until he was forced to flee the country with the secret police looking for him. He traveled to Rojava and helped publish a series of books about the revolutionary experiment there, participated in uprisings in Ukraine and Belarus, organized a clandestine network to fight against Putin, and was finally killed last April fighting against the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The book includes a biography tracing Dmitry’s activities and collects our translations of his writings. You can order it here.   Our comrades at the anarchist PR project Agency have announced a media grant in memory of Jen Angel, a longtime anarchist organizer who passed away last February.   This September also marks three years since the passing of David Graeber, a tireless, insightful, and wide-ranging anarchist thinker. We encourage you to visit The Museum of Care and the David Graeber Institute in his memory.   Until next time!

October 9th, 2023

Hey comrades! As conflicts intensify around the world, we bring you on-the-ground perspectives about how to understand what is going on and how to support movements for liberation in the midst of it. On October 7, Hamas carried out a series of attacks. The Israeli government has responded with a full military operation. While both sides have targeted civilians as well as soldiers, these events can only be understood in the context of decades of repression and ethnic cleansing.   To get perspective on the events, we conducted an interview with Jonathan Pollak, an anarchist from Jaffa. A longtime participant in Anarchists Against the Wall and other anti-colonial solidarity efforts, Jonathan is currently facing a prison sentence for protest activity earlier this year. In the interview, he explores how he sees the current escalation, describes how the Israeli judicial system structurally oppresses Palestinians, explains how to support Palestinian prisoners, and evaluates the effectiveness of solidarity efforts over the years. Anarchist Voices from Azerbaijan and Armenia As we feared, war is also continuing to spread across the former Soviet Union. Last month, a new round of violence broke out over the contested zone of Nagorno-Karabakh, also known as Artsakh, an Armenian enclave in Azerbaijan. To elucidate the situation, we’ve published a number of texts from anarchists in the region. Our first article, “Solidarity among the Displaced,” explores how Russian anarchists in exile supported Armenian refugees who had squatted the abandoned Ministry of Defense. Throughout the world, mass displacement is accelerating as climate catastrophe, economic crisis, and war drive millions into exile, both within their own countries and across borders. This story provides an inspiring example of how displaced people can continue to take political action in their new homes, establishing solidarity across the lines of ethnicity and nationality.   Our second article, “Anarchist Voices from Azerbaijan and Armenia,” presents a variety of perspectives from the region in the immediate aftermath of Azerbaijan’s military operation against Artsakh, explaining why it will drive tens of thousands into exile or worse.   In our third article, “Armenia in 2023,” the author argues that within Armenia, the ongoing Nagorno-Karabakh crisis has been used to quell dissent and discourage criticism of Armenian nationalism. Politicians on both sides of the conflict have used the threat of war to consolidate power and fatten their wallets. Despite having been partly responsible for creating this tragedy, the political opposition in Armenia is using Azerbaijan's seizure of the region opportunistically.   We’re committed to circulating the perspectives of anarchists and other opponents of state violence from all around the world, especially those outside North America and Western Europe. A truly international perspective can channel solidarity to those who need it most, illuminate issues close to home, and prepare us for confronting similar situations ourselves. Introducing Ink Lite We’ve added a new feature to the zine library on our site in case you need to go easy on the toner when you’re printing our zines. We call it Ink Lite. In this report, we explain the feature, discuss the historical reasons it is necessary, and list the nearly four dozen titles we already have available in this option. That's 45 titles already! Don't forget—we offer well over 100 PDFs altogether in our zine library.   Ink Lite is not to be confused with the lite version of our site, which you can use if you don’t have a lot of internet bandwidth at your disposal and need to load this website without images. You can find the option to switch to the lite version at the very bottom of every page on the site, or just navigate directly to lite.crimethinc.com. This November: Block Cop City Participants in the movement to #StopCopCity have called for a mass action to shut down construction of the police militarization facility on November 10-13. This follows the indictment of 61 people on trumped up RICO charges and the Atlanta city government's outrageous decision to reject a petition signed by over 100,000 locals demanding a referendum on whether to build Cop City. Music Don’t forget, there is also a CrimethInc. music page, where you can freely download all of the records we have released since 1995.   Here, you can watch footage of one of our classic bands speaking about the #StopCopCity struggle during a show last December. Looking Back on the Tumultuous Events of October 2019 October 2019 marked a pivotal point in social movement history, arguably the high point of the most recent wave of worldwide struggle against capitalism. This month, we’ll be looking back on those events as a way to take stock of where we are today.   First, Donald Trump gave Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan go-ahead to invade Rojava with the intention of carrying out genocide against Kurdish people. Well before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, this showed the hypocrisy of supposed “anti-imperialists” who were happy to see the autocratic ruler of another aspiring imperial force carry out a full-scale invasion, so long as the United States military was not directly involved. A year after the invasion, we conducted an interview with anarchists in Rojava.   Immediately after the Turkish invasion, however, an uprising in Ecuador set off a chain reaction leading to months of protracted street warfare in Chile. Elsewhere around the world, unrest was simmering from Hong Kong to Catalunya; it spread to Lebanon, Colombia, and elsewhere.    The movement in Chile arguably represents the furthest any social movement of our era has gone. Although it was ultimately trapped in the blind alley of constitutional reform, this simply illustrates the importance of developing a transformative approach to social change rather than relying on electoral strategies. Where to Find Us Since our last email, we’ve operated literature tables at the Bash Back! convergence in Chicago, the New York City Anarchist Book Fair, the Bay Area Anarchist Book Fair, and the Hamilton Anarchist Book Fair in Ontario, to name a few. Several interesting reports from the Bash Back! convergence have been published on their new news site. In November, we intend to present and table at the anarchist book fairs in Sacramento and Amsterdam, among other events.   Speaking of the 2019-2020 revolt in Chile, on its four-year anniversary, you are invited to join us for an event in Tucson, Arizona featuring memes, videos, and stories from the uprising. For background on the Chilean uprising of 2019, we recommend our four-episode podcast series on the subject. You can listen to the first episode here. Altogether, the series includes eight and a half hours of coverage from the streets, some of it in both English and Spanish. In Our Thoughts As we send out this email, our thoughts are with those facing charges in Philadelphia for taking action after police murdered Eddie Irizarry.   Our thoughts are with Indigenous activist Jacob Johns, who was shot on September 28. This was the second time in three years that a far-right assaulter shot a protester opposing the statue of genocidal conquistador Don Juan de Oñate. You can support Jacob here. Our thoughts are with everyone suffering in Palestine right now, regardless of religion or ethnic background, especially those who have been forced to live in refugee camps for years.   And finally, our thoughts are with you, dear comrade, whoever you may be. Everything we do, we do in hopes of helping to equip you to create for the life you desire, to fight for the freedom that you deserve. If you have ideas about how we can work together towards that end, please get in touch. Everything we do is produced and distributed by volunteer labor—and copyright free. We don’t rely on external funding or market trends. We’re trying to change the world, not turn a profit. If you wish to support us, you can do so here.

November 21st, 2023

Hello, dear comrades.

Welcome back to our newsletter. Here, we’ll update you on all our projects and publications over the past few weeks. The month and a half since last you heard from us has been full of tragedies, especially in Palestine. At the same time, we have been inspired by the courageous actions of people around the United States who have occupied government and university buildings, blockaded transportation infrastructure, and shut down weapons factories to call for a ceasefire in Gaza. This is a good time to spread knowledge about how to engage in direct action.

The Catastrophe in Palestine

As we write to you, the Israeli assault on Palestine has killed over 13,000 Palestinians and displaced well over a million more, with no end in sight. Almost half of the dead are children. Slaughtering thousands of children has not brought back the Israelis killed on October 7, nor has it secured the safe release of Israeli hostages. It will not halt the decades-long cycle of bloodshed that led to this tragedy. It can only lead to more deaths and concentrate more power in the hands of militarists and bigots. Israeli politicians are pursuing their own political benefit with no consideration for those who will experience the consequences. The United States government is apparently prepared to sign off on an unlimited amount of bloodshed to maintain its foothold in the oil-rich Mideast. While some hope for a ceasefire, it appears that the only way to stop the bloodletting will be to block the flow of arms to the Israeli military.

To provide background on the situation, we published a text from the perspective of a Palestinian in the Galilee of Palestine.

In “Strategizing for Palestinian Solidarity,” a collective of Jewish anarchists involved in the fight to Stop Cop City in Atlanta explains why they are committed to solidarity with Palestinians and what they think it will take to halt the assault on Gaza. They explore the protests calling for a ceasefire, arguing that solidarity movements must shift from presenting demands to taking direct action.

In “Shutting Down the Port of Tacoma,” participants in an attempt to blockade the port on November 6 explore strategic questions in the context of the decades-long history of port blockades in the Puget Sound.

In “How They Stopped Work at the Raytheon Facility,” we describe how demonstrators in southern California used the element of surprise to blockade a defense contractor facility on November 13.

History

As activists set out to target weapons manufacturers like Elbit Systems and Raytheon, it could be instructive to study previous campaigns. Two decades ago in the UK, a campaign known as Smash EDO set out to shut down an arms factory in Brighton. We’ve published an overview of that years-long struggle.

We also revisited an article we published in 2006, in which we suggested that one way to make sense of the Bush administration's otherwise incomprehensible decisions in Iraq was to assume that they were not trying to suppress jihadism, but rather to create an environment in which it could proliferate. Seventeen years later, this text looks prescient. It foretold the rise of the Islamic State, predicted the extension of the label “terrorist” to ordinary activists, and foresaw how the situation in Palestine foreshadowed other ethnic conflicts and forms of mass repression.

Audio

We are steadily releasing audio versions of our articles now, including “Strategizing for Palestinian Solidarity,” “From the Galilee to Gaza,” and “Understanding the RICO Charges in Atlanta.”

Zines

We’ve prepared a zine version of “From the Galilee to Gaza,” offering a Palestinian perspective on the assault on Palestinians. Please distribute these in your community. We've also prepared a zine version of "Green Scared?", our analysis of the FBI crackdown on ecological direct action in 2005. This text summarizes what we can learn from the strategy that the police and prosecutors used to repress activists.

Music

Last month, a new company has bought the music platform Bandcamp and fired half of the employees. If this goes anything like the acquisition of Twitter did, Bandcamp may cease to serve as a resource for do-it-yourself musicians and labels. Unfortunately, we use Bandcamp to keep all the music we have released over the decades available for free. If you want to download anything we've released, do it now while you still can!

Posters

We’ve made a poster expressing support for those on the receiving end of state violence in Palestine. “Neither the apartheid policies of the Israeli government nor the brutality of the Israeli military have brought safety to anyone in the region. There is no way to stop to the bloodshed without putting an end to the colonial oppression of Palestinians.”

Stickers

Our comrades at Municipal Adhesives have made a sticker version of our #StopCopCity "Defend the Forest" poster. You can order them here cheap.

Languages

Over the past month, thanks to the tireless assistance of our multilingual comrades around the world, we have published versions of our articles in ten languages including Spanish, Italian, French, Czech, Greek, Portuguese, Russian, Bulgarian, and Polish.   If you can help us to translate into any language, please contact us!

Events

Since our last message to you here, we’ve distributed massive quantities of literature at anarchist book fairs in Boston, Sacramento, and São Paulo, as well as at the Block Cop City weekend in Atlanta. If you want to invite us to table or speak at an event, contact us.

Thank You

Everything we do is copyright free, produced and distributed by volunteer labor. We’re trying to change the world, not turn a profit. If you wish to support us, you can do so here.   Above all, we are grateful that you are out there, permitting yourself to care and take action. Until next month, we wish you all the best in your efforts. May they intersect with ours.

Support Us Here

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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2312.15 - 10:10

- Days ago = 3084 days ago

- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.