It will be hard to remember what it felt like right now.
There are two options, as I see it. In the first, we return to “normal” weather patterns etc(how? Why? Is this not human-centric thinking, as if the world were made for us. Of course, lots of people believe it WAS made for us) and then these fevered weeks, where doom seems to be unfolding, appear as a, well, fever dream, and we go back to the long process of a slow apocalypse.
Or else (more likely?) this year is the beginning of wild increases in temperature, extreme weather events, food shortages for everyone (not just those people we don’t actually care about) and chaos, in which case we will be dumbfounded that we were not ALL throwing pink confetti on tennis courts. Certainly those people who are complaining about JSO will ‘delete their tweets’ (metaphorically – Twitter will be gone) and claim they always always took climate change seriously and supported strong action.
There’s a passage in Max Brooks’ World War Z where a guy glued to his computer in Japan goes through something similar.
Okay, for today’s triple-header.
Just LOOK at what is happening in the Antarctic. Holy fucking shit.
How I feel – dread, of course. How else am I supposed to feel?
The times that try men’s souls
This is a nice summation, except I don’t find much inspiring.
“We are in those inspiring, terrifying, tiring times when the civilization has ended, no one can make a feasible or even plausible argumemt for how to continue it, and yet no one is saying the obvious: it’s time for completely different ways of living.”
Gramsci and his “morbid symptoms” should get a run now, I guess? You know –
The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.
Except what “new” will arrive? Forced relocalisation, a loss of so much that made life “fun” (antibiotics, running water, advanced healthcare, leisure time etc). I assume the future is one of violence, fear, shortages of everything, capricious death. So, kinda like how billions of people live right now, though it is not necessary…
How I feel – oddly empty. I still can’t process what I am seeing. I still want to believe that if I tap the screen, those graphs will change, that the black vertical temperature line will disappear and be replaced by a more ‘reasonable’ one, that the red line showing what is going on in the Antarctic will fade away… I just can’t wrap my head around this. Emotionally but also even intellectually (as if the two systems weren’t tightly coupled!)
Deprogramming ourselves from deference, faith in our Lords and Masters
I heard a JSO guy on Radio 4 at 0750 this morning explaining that the reason sporting events have been targetted is because when they’ve gone to government departments or oil terminals (he said they had shut them down, which is a bit of poetic licence, but forgivable) there’d been no coverage.
The next obvious step (and presumably that monster Suella Braverman has ‘thought’ of this (i.e. one of her munchkins has tossed it to her, press release ready) is a deal with/demand on broadcasters to not mention these protests, to do a ‘wall of silence’. Would that work? Even in the 1980s Thatcher couldn’t really do it to the IRA (Gerry Adams’ voice impersonated etc etc). But they’ll do SOMETHING like this, given that they can’t, it seems, stop JSO people from getting onto pitches/courts etc. (You also wonder what Braverman is saying to M15/’Special Branch’ (whatever it’s called now) and GCHQ, demanding that they step up HUMINT, ELINT etc. “You’re telling me that you only have [x] officers in deep cover within these organisations? And that they are embedded in Extinction Rebellion and not JSO? The British taxpayer expects MORE from you…”
But finally, back to where I meant to start this section, around how the work of demystifying, of intellectual self-defence is a lifelong thing. Meaning, we have to see courts AND MEDIA for what they are.
We are raised to believe (‘we’ is doing a lot of work here – I mean middle/upper class people especially) that the police are there to serve and protect, that the court system is about justice, that prison is about rehabilitation. And the TV shows are full of cops solving crimes, protecting the innocent etc. That’s what makes shows like The Wire so rare, so valuable. They show that there are good cops, but working within wider systems, that are broken or in fact functioning as they are meant to.
We used to know this better, – “They make the laws to chain us well”
And this, on enclosures
The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
But leaves the greater villain loose
Who steals the common from off the goose.
We KNEW this shit. It’s been beaten out of us. We have been forced back into line. These myths will not comfort us as shit unravels, as it is now.
My friend Sakshi and I submitted an article to a journal (won’t say which one). The reviewers’ comments were … interesting (says every author of a rejected paper ever, I know). Rather than try to rework the paper into something it never set out to be, we have put it up a ‘pre-print’ in the hope of sparking some discussion among activists and any academics who aren’t [redacted on legal advice/because I already look like enough of a whiny punk loser to be going on with].
So, it’s here –
Court In A Trap? A Perspective On Justice-Seeking Activists And Academics, And Unseen State Power
Apologies for the turgid bullshit language – it’s what you have to do, it seems, to get anything published.
marchudson.net 
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