Featured Essays Politics All Insurrections Are Not Created Equal: On Writing Resistance After January 6th On the limits of dystopian science fiction as a model for direct action. By Micaiah Johnson | Published on October 29, 2024 Credit: Lionsgate Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Lionsgate When 2,000 civilians invaded the United States Capitol, I was in the middle of a re-reading of C.L.R. James’s Black Jacobins to prepare for writing an uprising of the oppressed in my own novel. It had been six months since my last protesting arrest, and I watched the insurrection with an uncanny mix of the familiar and the horrid, like coming upon maggots in food you only knew as good. The tactics were familiar, the indignation was familiar, the beneficiary was not.  When I’d imagined seeing an uprising against the government in my lifetime, I never predicted it would be on behalf of the least disenfranchised man in the world. That civilians would put their bodies and liberty on the line, not to speak truth to power, but to aggregate more power where power already was. I never pictured a coup for the “oppressed” that members would take private jets to attend.  Resorting, as always, to dark humor in uncertain times, I remember watching the footage of a ragtag group climbing through the windows and texting a friend, “Do we think they watched The Hunger Games, too?” The uncomfortable truth for those of us who love both science fiction and direct action protest, is that they very well might have. When the 2000s wave of dystopian uprising fiction came into popularity, it married the sentiments and iconography of real world oppression and resistance with the possibilities of fictional worlds. These books kept hallmarks of historical resistances—the incendiary three fingered gesture of The Hunger Games being taken from real Thai activists while also deployed in a way that invokes the raised fist of 1960s black power movements—but decontextualized them. By removing specifics of race and geography, they told a story where anyone could be the hero, anyone the crowd of oppressed. And I do mean anyone.  In her article “Capital or the Capitol?: The Hunger Games Fandom and Neoliberal Populism”, Rebecca Hill tracks the popularity of the novel among conservatives and far right extremists, pointing to examples like a commenter on the neo-nazi site Stormfront who praised main character Katniss as a “Hitler figure, a veteran, a reluctant hero, an idealist.” The unintended side effect of cloaking these oppressions in metaphor is the space it leaves for bigotry to not just hide, but be affirmed. Hill diagnoses this as a craft problem, a “failure of detailed world building,” but I disagree. This transportability is not a failure within the text that leads to this overlap, but a success with unintended consequences. To envision yourself as the main character is the invitation of fiction, and the long reach of these dystopias are testament to the skill of writers like Suzanne Collins and Veronica Roth at crafting such an invite.   The problem isn’t with craft, but with the human heart. The protest group I was a part of in 2020 never breached the doors of our capitol, but because we were gathered for antiracism, not feral nationalism, we were arrested violently for “crimes” as trespassing despite being on the public ground surrounding the building, or felony vandalism for writing names of victims of police violence in chalk. At first glance, our group couldn’t have been more different from the January 6th participants. We were trying to lessen the hold of racism’s representation in our government by demanding the bust of the first grand wizard of the Klu Klux Klan be removed from its place of honor in the capitol building; the insurrectionists were trying to maintain racial hierarchy and furthered racial terror by committing the act while wearing symbols from white supremacist groups. We hosted speakers from the community, sang hymns, and held vigils for those killed by state sanctioned violence. They… smeared shit on the walls.  So no, not immediately analogous in an obvious way. But I have no doubt their conviction was every bit as pure as mine, that their belief in their own heroism was just as potent as any freedom fighter, and that tales of individuals rising up in defiance were as dear to their heart as they remain to mine. The answer to this problem could never be to go back in time to change the texts, because our desire to see ourselves as the hero will persist. The dystopian uprising tales of the 2000s captured the attractive clarity of good versus evil even before the Marvel Cinematic Universe had fully tapped into that potential. In the stories the hero is always scrapping, suffering, and trying. The villains, various light-haired authoritarians who manage to be both ruthless and largely unaffected until the very end. The equation makes it clear: am I experiencing true outrage, sweaty conviction, a hint of rage at my own mistreatment? I must be the hero. Smarmy calculating coldness with a desire to exert control? That’s the villain. Assigning roles based on emotion means when someone tells you you’re wrong, and it hurts, that must be an attack, because the feeling is what decides whether it is or not. And if you are being attacked, you must be the protagonist. Not just a hero, but a righteous one, an avenger. And if you perceive the entity hurting you as being more powerful than you? Congratulations. You’re a revolutionary now. Does this mean it’s unavoidable? Is this the inevitable consequence of art that compels mixed with a human tendency to imagine ourselves as the center of these stories? Are we doomed to the same decontextualization of metaphor that allows cops to wear Punisher logos on their uniforms? I don’t accept that. I love story like a well-meaning, accident-prone friend, meaning I choose to believe it causes no problems it cannot also fix. For every Jane Eyre, a The Wife Upstairs. For every Ringworld by Larry Niven, a Loki’s Ring by Steina Leicht. For every Starship Troopers, a Starship Troopers (1997).  So what would it look like to use the effectiveness of invitation as a moment of self-reflection instead of carte blanche empowerment? What happens when the call to imagine yourself as the dystopian hero main character is a trap? What happens is something like Emily Tesh’s Some Desperate Glory. Tesh’s narrative begins very much like the dystopias of the past. The main character, Kyr,  fits the “dystopian heroine” archetype: exceptionally skilled, full of conviction, and dedicated to the cause of overcoming an oppressor. But as the narrative progresses, and Kyr’s dedication rides close enough to fanaticism to challenge the reader’s morality, each off note in her decision making becomes a dare to the reader: how far will you follow that feeling of righteousness before asking, Am I the bad guy? Tesh’s work tells us an uncomfortable truth: villains are not mustache-twirling, cold-hearted monsters who know only greed and lust for power. They can believe in their cause. They can love those who engage in it with them. And they can feel every bit as righteous as their opponents. For Tesh’s Kyr, once she moves past the emotional and individual response to the historic loss of her homeworld, she is able to look outward to the larger systems at play to understand where harm actually resides. To face the impossible truth that her people may have suffered a loss, but they’d allowed a fixation on their victimization to turn them into the worst kind of villain.  We’ve done a lot of work to move into a place where feelings are validated. This is an important step. But the next challenge after acknowledging individual feelings is to contextualize them, to recognize that they don’t exist in a vacuum and often they are given to us more than they originate within us. The fear a white woman might feel when she crosses the street upon seeing a black man might feel legitimate, but that does not mean it is clean. Structures of power, historical legacies, and social realities are always at play around us, consciously and unconsciously. That is why, even though both things may hurt the recipient, meanness is not the same as racism, and the difference between an inconvenience and a hate crime is not that you hate it. Fifteen years ago, dystopian science fiction invited us to pay attention. It asked us to notice things we did not like and rise up to change it, regardless of what those around us thought. In a post January 6th world, we might be best served by lingering in the space between outrage and action, to investigate hurt rather than linking it to impulse, to look for blood on our own hands before demanding it from others. As we learn from Emily Tesh’s Kyr, sometimes the way to become a hero, is to relinquish the assumption that you already are.[end-mark] The post All Insurrections Are Not Created Equal: On Writing Resistance After January 6th appeared first on Reactor.

MASH was a beloved series that ran for 11 seasons on CBS. Based on Roger Altman’s film about the Korean War – and thinly veiled critique of the Vietnam War – the television show would go on to break viewership records and win numerous awards during its historic run. It still has quite a large fan base today. But you probably know all about that. What you might not realize is the fascinating... Source

The Left Is Now a Joke

And it’s a new-to-science species, too.

The latest outlook from the agency is an update on its modeling from August 2024.

A chocolate scandal might hold the answer.

Astronaut safety and keeping up with repairs are major concerns for the rest of the decade and beyond.

The sincerest expression of love is the desire to know everything about the subject of that love. I love nature. This is why, as a scientist, I wish to obtain as much experimental data as possible about nature. There are an infinite number of virtual realities, some of which are flattering to our ego. But merely expressing them without knowing whether they apply to reality, is like imagining a possible love story with an idealized fictional character, akin to “Prince Charming” or “Princess Charming.” This was my message to an audience of fifty spiritual leaders who were hosted by the “Harvard Law School Program on Biblical Law and Christian Legal Studies”. My Fireside Chat was moderated by Tim Dalrymple, President and CEO of “Christianity Today”. After Tim introduced me as a farm boy born in the Holy Land and turned into an astrophysicist, I added the disclaimer that my knowledge is limited to the observable Universe. “What lies beyond that is Tim’s expertise,” I reciprocated. During the next hour of conversation, I explained that science and spirituality both seek to understand the unknown. Our knowledge is an island in an ocean of ignorance. After a century of observational studies, cosmologists do not even know the nature of 85% of the matter and 95% of the energy in the Universe. Not to speak of what happened before the Big Bang. A century ago, Albert Einstein thought that a static Universe is more philosophically appealing than a universe with a beginning in time. Between 1935–1939, Einstein also argued that gravitational waves do not exist, quantum mechanics should not have spooky action at a distance, and black holes do not exist. The experimental teams that proved Einstein wrong by discovering the cosmic microwave background, black holes, gravitational waves and quantum entanglement, received the Physics Nobel Prize. These are all good reasons to stay humble and treat science as a learning experience. Nature is under no obligation to make us happy. We tend to position ourselves at the center of the Universe, but our default assumption should be that we are not important in the cosmic scheme of things. Nevertheless, our ability to learn about the richness of nature is what makes life worth living. The more we learn, the more difficult it is to avoid being at awe with what nature had before we came to exist. It is humbling to recognize how difficult it is for our modern technologies to imitate nature. The natural neural network of our brain consumes 12 watts, whereas neural networks of artificial intelligence have fewer connections but consume gigawatts of power. In 2024, physicists demonstrated fusion at the National Ignition Facility in Livermore by producing a megajoule of energy, which the Sun produces in a few thousandths of an attosecond (namely, a few times 10 to the power of -21 of a second). Our current technologies are unable to produce a self-healing car or a self-reproducing gadget, whereas the human body heals after minor accidents and can produce new bodies just like it. Nevertheless, science holds the potential for fulfilling our greatest spiritual aspirations. If physicists develop a predictive theory that unifies quantum mechanics with gravity, they might be able to figure out the conditions that led to the Big Bang. Having that recipe would allow science to artificially create these conditions in the laboratory and give birth to a baby universe. This would fulfil the job requirement for the biblical God who according to the opening of Genesis created our Universe. This feat might take a very long time to accomplish, perhaps billions of years of science and technology instead of the one century we had since quantum mechanics was discovered. But there is a shortcut. Most stars formed billions of years before the Sun, and another civilization may have figured out quantum gravity by now. Knowing what aliens already know would save us time. Forget about disclosure of what our government knows about aliens. What really matters is disclosure of what aliens know about the Universe. Having a smarter student in our class offers a future opportunity for bringing science and spirituality together. The Messianic age might be ushered in by a visitor from another star. This will deliver the much-needed shock therapy to humanity, which is currently wasting resources in pointless conflicts on Earth, a tiny residue from the formation of the Sun. Tim noted that religious Americans are less likely to believe that intelligent life exists on other planets, although in his view God has the attention span to care for beings on multiple planets. I confirmed that I have two daughters and the love I extend to one does not take away from the love to the other. We often think in terms of zero-sum games, but the most fulfilling aspects of our life involve infinite-sum games. A recent poll showed that more Americans believe in extraterrestrial intelligence than in the biblical God. “You have an opportunity to get them into your congregation,” I suggested to Tim. My hope is that humanity will encounter an interstellar messenger with an uplifting message during my lifetime. Just as in our private life, finding a cosmic partner will give a new meaning to our existence. After that, the night sky will not appear as dark and lonely anymore. The standard cosmological lore will not regard the Universe as a pointless mix of particles and radiation. If we find other actors on the cosmic stage, we can ask them what the play is about. We can visit their homes and witness their technological infrastructure, just like kids visiting neighbors who marvel at their toys. To pursue this search scientifically, I am leading the Galileo Project which is seeking objects near Earth that may have been manufactured by extraterrestrial technological civilizations. Following the discovery of the first interstellar object, `Oumuamua, on October 19, 2017, I became interested in the scientific study of anomalous objects that visit us from outside the Solar System. The brightness of sunlight reflected off `Oumuamua changed by a factor of ten as this football-field-size object tumbled every eight hours. These extreme brightness variations implied that `Oumuamua was shaped like a pancake. This mysterious object accelerated away from the Sun without signs of cometary evaporation, and receded from Earth faster than any human-made rocket. A similar push by reflection of sunlight was detected for another object, 2020 SO, which was verified to be a rocket booster from a 1966 launch by NASA. To separate technological artifacts from rocks, astronomers can now collect better data on interstellar objects using the Webb telescope and the upcoming Rubin Observatory in Chile. My conversation with Tim and the spiritual leaders ended after an hour, because I had to teach a class of students at the Harvard Astronomy department. Training young students is key to assuring that we will continue to learn more about our cosmic neighborhood. Hopefully, the Messianic message of peace and prosperity will arrive before humanity will trigger an existential catastrophe with its emerging technologies. The post Love, Science, and the Cosmic Quest for Truth appeared first on Anomalien.com.

Beloved author J.K. Rowling criticized transgender athletes who compete in women's sports by saying they are stealing medals from women.Rowling was responding to a report from the United Nations that detailed the shocking amount of medals women had lost in sporting events across the globe up to March 2024.The eye-opening study revealed that more than 600 female athletes had lost medals in 29 sporting categories, totaling almost 900 medals going to men who identify as women in over 400 competitions."Over 890 medals, across 29 sports, stolen from women by men," Rowling wrote on X. — (@) 'We're not supposed to feel empathy for those women and girls.'Readers soon chimed in on Rowling's thread, with one pointing to the amount of effort and training female athletes are putting in only for them to lose out to a biological male.Rowling responded directly to the remark with the ironic statement, "We're not supposed to feel empathy for those women and girls.""The only people we should coddle are the mediocre men who decided they'd enjoy medals without the hassle of competing in the correct category." — (@) Sadly, Rowling's statement has rung true in recent instances of men playing against women.NCAA volleyball player Sia Liilii said that her Nevada team was told by school officials they "weren't educated enough" and "didn't understand the science" when they refused to play against a team with a male athlete.Similarly, San Jose State University's Brooke Slusser said that when her school had meetings about a male athlete on her team, administrators predominantly focused on the well-being of the transgender individual and not the girls."We've had meetings, and it's a lot of just checking in on [the male athlete]. ... We were like 'what about us?'" Slusser recalled. "Everyone above you is telling you you shouldn't be talking for [the male], you need to make sure the other person is okay," she explained.During the 2024 Olympics, Rowling was highly critical of controversial boxer Imane Khelif, who won a gold medal in women's boxing. Although the Olympics do not conduct gender tests, both the International Boxing Association and the World Boxing Organization claimed Khelif is a man.Rowling shared an image of Khelif and opponent Angela Carini at the time, saying Khelif had "the smirk of a male [who] knows he's protected by a misogynist sporting establishment enjoying the distress of a woman he's just punched in the head."Khelif ended up naming Rowling in a criminal hate speech complaint in France. The complaint was made to Paris' online hate speech office and claimed Khelif was a victim of cyber harassment.Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

Jeff Bezos, the owner of the Washington Post, staunchly defended the newspaper’s leadership decision to cease political endorsements, citing the public’s pervasive distrust of corporate media outlets.On Monday evening, Bezos released an opinion piece responding to reports that the Post would not back a presidential candidate in the upcoming election, as it did during previous election cycles. 'I sighed when I found out.'According to NPR, the paper faced significant criticism for the decision and reportedly lost more than 200,000 subscribers and counting — roughly 8% of its base. Other media outlets, including The Hill, the New Republic, and the Atlantic, torched Bezos for refusing to endorse Vice President Kamala Harris.Bezos’ op-ed explained the reason behind the decision, stating that the news media “is now the least trusted of all,” according to an annual public survey about trust and reputation.“We must be accurate, and we must be believed to be accurate. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but we are failing on the second requirement. Most people believe the media is biased,” Bezos stated. “It would be easy to blame others for our long and continuing fall in credibility (and, therefore, decline in impact), but a victim mentality will not help. Complaining is not a strategy. We must work harder to control what we can control to increase our credibility.”Bezos argued that political endorsements from newspapers do not have a measurable impact on election results.“No undecided voters in Pennsylvania are going to say, ‘I’m going with Newspaper A’s endorsement.’ None. What presidential endorsements actually do is create a perception of bias. A perception of non-independence,” Bezos continued.He called ending the paper’s endorsements “a principled decision,” adding that it is “a meaningful step in the right direction.”The Post was accused of making the decision not to endorse a candidate after an executive with one of Bezos’ companies met with former President Donald Trump. Bezos insisted that he was unaware of the meeting and that there was “no quid pro quo of any kind.” He noted that the decision was made internally and that neither presidential candidate was consulted.“Dave Limp, the chief executive of one of my companies, Blue Origin, met with former president Donald Trump on the day of our announcement. I sighed when I found out, because I knew it would provide ammunition to those who would like to frame this as anything other than a principled decision,” Bezos explained. He remarked, “But the fact is, I didn’t know about the meeting beforehand. Even Limp didn’t know about it in advance; the meeting was scheduled quickly that morning. There is no connection between it and our decision on presidential endorsements, and any suggestion otherwise is false.”Bezo stated that he is “not an ideal owner” of the newspaper “when it comes to the appearance of conflict.”“Every day, somewhere, some Amazon executive or Blue Origin executive or someone from the other philanthropies and companies I own or invest in is meeting with government officials. I once wrote that The Post is a ‘complexifier’ for me. It is, but it turns out I’m also a complexifier for The Post,” Bezos declared.“You can see my wealth and business interests as a bulwark against intimidation, or you can see them as a web of conflicting interests. Only my own principles can tip the balance from one to the other,” he added.Because of general distrust of the corporate media, the public has turned to “off-the-cuff podcasts, inaccurate social media posts and other unverified news sources, which can quickly spread misinformation and deepen division,” Bezos noted.The business magnate pledged not to use the Post to push his own interests and stated that he would do everything in his ability to revive the newspaper’s credibility. “To win this fight, we will have to exercise new muscles. Some changes will be a return to the past, and some will be new inventions. Criticism will be part and parcel of anything new, of course,” Bezos said.Last week, a New York Times source revealed that Bezos has requested that the paper hire more conservative op-ed writers to expand its audience, Blaze News previously reported. Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!