If you plan to defend nature, write down the names of birds and landscape as a start.

Orwell wrote that freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two equals four. He wrote that he who controls the past controls the future, and that he who controls the present controls the past. If you can colonize the minds of a population with untruths and confusion, you forcibly re-write reality. This is done with stories. It’s done with language. How we speak about the world is a reflection of how we see it.

NOTES FROM THE RESISTANCE: A COLUMN ON LANGUAGE AND POWER

Familiar tactics...

“The challenges inherent in creating the alliance sought by the Populists were formidable, as race prejudice ran the highest among the very white populations to which the Populist appeal was specifically addressed—the depressed lower economic classes. Nevertheless, the Populist movement initially enjoyed remarkable success in the South, fueled by a wave of discontent aroused by the severe agrarian depression of the 1880s and 1890s. The Populists took direct aim at the conservatives, who were known as comprising a party of privilege, and they achieved a stunning series of political victories throughout the region. Alarmed by the success of the Populists and the apparent potency of the alliance between poor and working-class whites and African Americans, the conservatives raised the cry of white supremacy and resorted to the tactics they had employed in their quest for Redemption, including fraud, intimidation, bribery, and terror.

Segregation laws were proposed as part of a deliberate effort to drive a wedge between poor whites and African Americans. These discriminatory barriers were designed to encourage lower- class whites to retain a sense of superiority over blacks, making it far less likely that they would sustain interracial political alliances aimed at toppling the white elite. The laws were, in effect, another racial bribe.

The agricultural depression, taken together with a series of failed reforms and broken political promises, had pyramided to a climax of social tensions. Dominant whites concluded that it was in their political and economic interest to scapegoat blacks, and “permission to hate” came from sources that had formerly denied it […].”

the new jim crow

The Trump Story Project

Beginning Tuesday, Slate is presenting The Trump Story Project

Slate

Khaled's Ladder

On January 27, Khaled Jarrar set out on an uncommon journey: traveling in a 34-foot RV from San Diego, California, to Juarez, Mexico, crisscrossing and following the U.S.-Mexico border along the way. Jarrar was traveling as part of Culturunners, a project initiated by Edge of Arabia in partnership with Art Jameel, in which artists travel from place to place in order to explore contested boundaries. On the journey the group encountered border patrol agents on both sides of the border, met and worked with locals living near the border, and organized talks at galleries and public spaces. During his time on the road, Jarrar created and installed a new work, Khaled’s Ladder, using material pulled from the border fence. Coming from his home in the West Bank, where the Israeli separation wall shapes daily life and restricts freedom of movement, Khaled was alert to the ways in which the U.S.–Mexico border informs the experiences of those who live on either side of it. 

here

“When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’

Here

quote: Lewis Carroll, 

Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There

JANUARY 21, 2017

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YOU ARE INVOLVED....

The 1970 New York Artists’ Strike that Prefigured #J20

an "anthropology of the present"

"If there’s a contemporary “condition,” this is perfectly captured by the phenomenon of buffering. Or buffeting. The end-limit, the event-horizon, of both situations is a crash."


Tom McCarthy, Satin Island, interview at  Salon