Good review of Caliban and the Witch by Karl Kersplebedeb.
A portrait of cult leader Bentinho Massaro (who I'd never heard of before) by Be Scofield who spent a month with the cult in Sedona. I think Scofield over-emphasizes the tech/startup angle... since when does having a website and an instagram account qualify as a "brilliant" use of technology? It's like the commentators who still can't get over that ISIS members use Twitter.
Scofield's description does certainly paint Massaro as a typical narcissist guru. Why does there always seem to be a few thousand people in Boulder and Sedona who feel a need to be financially fleeced and abusively told what to believe by an unrepentant liar? (I guess if the 2016 election is an indication, it's not a phenomenon limited to New Age hotspots.)
"Garden hermits or ornamental hermits were hermits encouraged to live in purpose-built hermitages, follies, grottoes, or rockeries on the estates of wealthy land-owners, primarily during the 18th century. Such hermits would be encouraged to dress like druids and remain permanently on-site, where they could be fed, cared-for and consulted for advice or viewed for entertainment."
"The park rangers took Jackson’s sleeping bag, blankets, and his tent, yet left all of his other property on the ground. Jackson and his comrades believe the park rangers only took the survival gear to force them into shelters or force them to move farther out of sight and out of mind."
A great archive of works on caring and domestic labour.
I've not read the book, but I enjoyed this review. I like the idea of the Cambridge University Press debate series; I should browse the titles sometime.
This site aggregates several anarchist audio shows.
The new Inquiry's reading list "created by a group of Black, Brown, Indigenous, Muslim, and Jewish people who are writers, organizers, teachers, anti-fascists, anti-capitalists, and radicals" for the Trump era.
50,000 Haitians are losing their Temporary Protected Status.
"As the only U.S. immigration program that grants legal rights to migrants in response to environmental disasters, the fate of the program should be seen as a de facto test case for how the world’s wealthiest country, and its largest historical emitter of greenhouse gases, is going treat the coming waves of climate refugees.
"So far, the message is clear: Go back to a hell of our making."
"Hipparchia of Maroneia (fl. c. 325 BC) was a Cynic philosopher, and wife of Crates of Thebes. She was born in Maroneia, but her family moved to Athens, where Hipparchia came into contact with Crates, the most famous Cynic philosopher in Greece at that time. She fell in love with him, and, despite the disapproval of her parents, she married him. She went on to live a life of Cynic poverty on the streets of Athens with her husband."
"When the world’s two great propaganda systems agree on some doctrine, it requires some intellectual effort to escape its shackles. One such doctrine is that the society created by Lenin and Trotsky and moulded further by Stalin and his successors has some relation to socialism in some meaningful or historically accurate sense of this concept. In fact, if there is a relation, it is the relation of contradiction."
Full album of Mischief Brew's "Thanks, Bastards!" demo on Youtube.
"Darius McCollum impersonates transit employees, steals their subway cars and buses, then drives off on the correct routes."
It's more than a waste that the MTA thinks it is better to keep this guy in prison for years than to cut him a paycheck.
Wikipedia entry for Darius McCollum: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darius_McCollum
SkyNews interview with a young British ISIS fighter.
One of the funniest r/ChapoTrapHouse threads ever.
Sizeable protests have been taking place in St. Louis almost every day since Officer Jason Stockley was acquitted in the shooting of Lamar Smith. Rebelutionary Z has been streaming most actions live on his stream: http://rebz.tv/
A profile of RAM, a white supremacist street-fighting club that's been attending many of the right-wing rallies around the country lately.
"Kiyoshi Kuromiya, born in a Japanese American internment camp in 1943 in Heart Mountain, Wyoming, was a prominent underground civil rights figure and gay rights activist. Kuromiya worked closely with Martin Luther King Jr. in the mid-sixties and tending to King’s children in the aftermath of his assassination. He was a founder of Gay Liberation Front –Philadelphia, worked with the Black Panther Party to advocate for gay rights, co-authored a book on a utopian future through technology with Buckminster Fuller, and was a leading pioneer in the fight to promote AIDS awareness after his own diagnosis later in life."