Meanwhile in Arkansas, USA, they’re “protecting the kids.”

❌ Deny trans kids the right to exist
❌ Intimidate doctors providing care
✅ Allow child labour

Reads like a prequel to The Handmaid’s Tale.

https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2023/07/31/hundreds-of-new-arkansas-laws-set-to-take-effect-aug-1

#arkansas #usa #uspol #republicans #conservatives #Dickensian #bigots #everydayFascism

“The creative act – the arduous task of seeing something other than the space of capitalism, statism, the gender binary, racism, and other rooms without a view – is the hope we can offer to the world.”

I stumbled on these old words of mine, penned for an anthology in what feels like a wholly different era (2007), while stumbling to find new words today for a future book project. Rather than writing, I kept gazing distractedly out a window, into the grayness and rain, carrying with it invisible toxic particles from fires far away. Funny how weather, now so overdetermined by the climate catastrophe, has become a mirror to systemic human folly and our existential angst.

Wordsmithing—the art form that choose me, as compulsion, as passion, as medium to sketch out social critique and social vision—has been harder and harder of late. What good are books in an ecocidal end time that might take humanity with it? What more can be said, even if there are people left to read, about what has become an #EverydayFascism, so normal that it was barely newsworthy yesterday, for instance, that a young white male was planning a synagogue massacre in the town I grew up in. And even if he’d succeeded, what else could be scribed about it that wouldn’t sound stale or trite or repetitive?

What can the muse of language supply when the myriad possibilities, never mind collective memories, contained between book covers have been banned and emptied from library shelves, figuratively and literally? The walls of cities have been sanitized of street poetry? The artifice of AI has stolen our writerly voice, our soul?

What if all we see these days—so plagued by despair, so full of fresh traumas and new violences around every corner—are rooms without views? How are we, writer-rebels, to conjure words that have the power to fling open windows?

Maybe part of the answer is looking backward to remind ourselves that we’ve long had to engage in the art of world-building from the rubble at hand. We’ve long still written horizons into being.

(For my “Reappropriate the Imagination” essay, see https://cbmilstein.wordpress.com/2012/06/20/reappropriate-the-imagination-2/)

(Photo: Sharpie’d image of a tiny fellow pushing up a window shade [or fence?] to get a tiny glimpse of an idyllic natural area, drawn on paper-bag-brown-colored sticker paper and pasted on an already-graffiti-full wall on the stolen lands of Tio’tia:ke/Montreal)

"in many ways Sunak is significantly to the right of his predecessors on social issues. His decision to embrace the National Conservatism movement and its far-right fringe this week, after its members were previously rejected by both Johnson and Cameron, takes the Conservative party in a particularly alarming direction"

#TheNastyParty
#EverydayFascism
#ToriesOut

https://www.bylinesupplement.com/p/half-of-brits-dont-trust-met-police

There is something deeply dysfunctional about London's plod. If only one could see a pattern that might provide some sort of clue to the underlying root causes.

#MetropolitanPolice
#EverydayFascism

Good to see the government cracking down on the government

#UKPolitics
#EverydayFascism

I'm the first to admit that I can fling swear words about with gusto but I very, very rarely use the "C" word.

This man is a cunt.

#GTTO
#EverydayFascism

https://www.disabilitynewsservice.com/disability-minister-faces-resignation-calls-after-posting-dangerous-and-hostile-video/

"Despite UK Government assertions to the contrary, the United Nations High Commission for Refugees has said that the overwhelming majority of refugees have no access to safe and legal routes to the UK. This is an entirely manufactured problem created by the right in order to distract from the Conservatives' many failings."

#UKPoltics
#TheNastyParty
#EverydayFascism
#GTTO

https://www.thenational.scot/politics/23486456.tory-mps-look-set-proving-nastiness-uk-government-policy/