Guy Debord
The slogan ‘Revolution or Death!’ is no longer the lyrical expression of consciousness in revolt: rather, it is the last word of the scientific thought of our century. It applies to the perils facing the species as to the inability of individuals who belong. In a society where it is well known that the suicide rate is on the increase, the experts had to admit, reluctantly, that during May 1968 in France it fell to almost nil. That spring also vouchsafed us a clear sky, and it did so effortlessly, because few cars were burnt and the shortage of petrol prevented the others from polluting the air.
‘Hell Hath No Fury’: A Chronology of Genderfuck Insurrection
Hell hath no fury like a drag queen scorned.
- Silvia Rivera
The chronology below requires little introduction; the actions of all these rioters speak for themselves. Suffice to say that this chronology is a small attempt to address a fallacy in popular conceptions of insurrection—that insurrection is ‘macho,’ masculine, or that it reinforces gender norms. It should also address another fallacy in the commonly understood chronology of queer and trans resistance—the one that says “Stonewall was first.”
A note on language. Any terms we apply anachronistically will fail to reflect the ways these individuals and collectives identified. Moreover, we have first-hand accounts from none of these rioters, except some Stonewall and Compton’s participants. Since any language we choose for such a broad span of time, place and culture will be historically inaccurate, we just say genderfuck insurrection. It has the nicest ring to our ears.
Genderfuck is an active term; it speaks of a force that acts upon gender normality. This is more interesting to us than other terms that are passive and speak of identity, which attempt to freeze and quarantine gender transgression into special individuals.
Our tour begins in Greece, the cradle of democracy and the location of the most recent massive insurrection against the false hope of democracy…
390 – Thessalonica, Greece. Butheric, the commander of the militia, arrested a popular circus performer under a new law that punished “male effeminacy.” The people of Thessalonica, who loved the performer, rose up in rebellion and killed Burtheric. In response to the insurrection, authorities rounded up and massacred three thousand people.
1250 – Southern France. A small crowd of cross-dressed males pranced into the home of a wealthy landowner. They sang “We take one and give back a hundred,” and ignored the protestations of the lady of the house as they looted the estate of every possession.
1450-51 – Cade’s Rebellion in Kent & Essex, England. Led by the “servants of the Queen of the Fairies,” the peasants broke into the Duke of Buckingham’s land and took his bucks and does.
1530 – ‘New Spain.’ During his campaign of conquest against communities of resistance in western portions of “New Spain,” Spanish conquistador Nuño de Guzmán wrote of a battle. The very last indigenous warrior taken prisoner after the battle was, in the conquistador’s words, “a man in the habit of a woman” who had “fought most courageously.”
16th century – Europe. Urban carnivals throughout Europe integrated cross-dressing and masks as key elements. The festivals were organized by societies of unmarried ‘men’ with trans personalities. They were called the Abbeys of Misrule, Abbots of Unreason, ‘Mére Folle and her children,’ and others. During festival, they would ‘hold court’ with mock marriages and issue coins to the crowds. They made fun of the government, critiqued the clergy, and protested war and the high cost of bread.
1629 – Essex, England. Grain riot led by ‘Captain’ Alice, who was trans.
1630 – Dijon, France. Mére Folle and her Infanterie went beyond throwing carnivals and mocking elites. They led an uprising against royal tax officers. As a result, a furious royal edict abolished the Abbey of Misrule.
1631 – England. Riots again enclosure led by ‘Lady Skimmington’ drag mob.
1645 – Montpellier, France. Tax revolt led by La Branlaire, who was called by a term for masculine women.
1720 – The Caribbean Sea. Untold numbers of trans pirates sailed across the open seas in the Golden Age of Piracy. It was not altogether uncommon at the time for “women” to “pass as men” while sailing in the navy, on mercantile ships, and as pirates. The two most well-known trans pirates of the era are Read and Bonn. They sailed together with Captain John Rackham, and their stories are known from when they were put on trial for piracy. They were said to be the most fierce and courageous fighters in their crew. Like most pirates, they were faggots.
1725 – Covent Garden Molly House Rebellion, London, England. Since 1707, the Societies for the Reformation of Manners carried out systematic attacks on London’s queer underground. More than 20 “molly houses” were raided by police in London and many “mollies” (mtfs) publicly dragged and hung for cross-dressing. But on one day in 1725, the police attempted a raid of a Covent Garden molly house, and the crowd of mollies, many in drag, fiercely and violently fought back.
1728-1749 – Toll Gate Riots in England. “To cite but four examples, toll gates were demolished by bands of armed men dressed in women’s clothing and wigs in Somerset in 1731 and 1749, in Gloucester in 1728 and in Herefordshire in 1735.”
1736 – Edinburgh, Scotland, “the Porteous Riots, which were sparked by a hated English officer and oppressive custom laws and expressed resistance to the union of Scotland and England, were carried out by men disguised as women and with a leader known as Madge Wildfire.”
1760s – White Boy commons restoration movement in Ireland. The ‘White Boys,’ a peasant guerrilla group who called themselves ‘fairies’ and did mischief at night, were a central feature of the rural class war. They destroyed enclosures, sent threatening letters to elites, reclaimed properties seized by landlords, and freed bound apprentices. They were finally put down by armed force. Their spirit inspired the formation of the ‘Lady Rocks’ and ‘Lady Clares’ in the 1820s and 1830s, and the later Ribbon Societies and Molly Maguires—all were involved in Ireland’s anti-enclosure and anti-colonial struggles and all cross-dressed.
1770s – Beaujolais, France. ‘Male’ peasants dressed as women attacked surveyors assessing their lands for a new landlord.
1812 – ‘General Ludd’s wives’ loom riot, Stockton, England. One of the early Luddite Rebellions against the Industrial Revolution was led by “General Ludd’s wives,” two cross-dressed workers. The mob of hundreds broke windows, stoned the house of Joseph Goodair, a factory owner, and later set fire to his house. They destroyed the products in the steam loom factory, smashed the looms and burned the factory to the ground. The rioting went on for four days until it was stopped by the military at Stockport, and then broke out again at Oldham.
1820s – Ireland. The ‘Lady Rocks’ militant Irish resistance group active; inspired by the White Boys, they wore bonnets and veils.
1829 – The War of the Demoiselles in the Pyrenees. A peasant uprising against restrictive forest code in which the peasants cross-dressed.
1830s – Ireland. The ‘Lady Clares’ militant Irish resistance group active; inspired by the White Boys, their ‘official’ costume was cross-dressing.
1839-1844 – Welsh Toll-gate Riots, carried out by ‘Rebecca and her daughters.’ One well-documented instance was on May 13, 1839. At dusk, a call of horns, drums and gunfire are be heard across the western Welsh countryside. Armed male peasants, dressed as women, thunder up on horseback, waving pitchforks, axes, scythes, and guns. As they storm the toll gate their leader roars: “Hurrah for free laws! Toll gates free to coal pits and lime kilns!” These demands are punctuated by a cacophony of music, shouts, and shotgun blasts. The rebel troops smash the toll barriers and ride away victorious. They call themselves “Rebecca and her daughters.” The Rebeccas are active for four years in Wales, leading thousands of cross-dressed “daughters” in the destruction of turnpike toll barriers. They receive widespread popular support.
1843 – Militant resistance group the ‘Molly Maguires’ active in Ireland. Inspired by the White Boys, the word “Molly” was the vernacular equivalent of what we might call “queen” today.
1959 – Cooper’s Donuts Riot, LA Los Angeles, May 1959. Police attempted a raid on Cooper’s Doughnuts, a late-night hangout for drag queens, butch hustlers, street queens and johns. The cops demanded IDs. The queers fought back. Doughnuts and coffee cups become projectiles. Fighting spilled out onto the street. The cops, taken by storm, called for backup. Rioters were arrested and the street was closed off for a day.
1966 – Compton’s Cafeteria Riot, San Francisco, August 1966. Compton’s Cafeteria, an all-night hangout for drag queens, and hustlers in the Tenderloin neighborhood. The restaurant management called the police on a group of young queens who were being rowdy. A police officer who was used to roughing up Compton’s regulars grabbed a queen. She threw her coffee in his face. A fight broke out. Plates, trays, cups, and furniture were thrown. The plate-glass windows of the restaurant were smashed. Police called for backup as the riot took the street. The windows of a cop car were smashed and a newspaper stand went up in flames.
1969 – Stonewall Riot, New York City, June 28. The police conduct a ‘routine’ raid of the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village. They began to round up trans people, drag queens and kings to be arrested for cross-dressing, which was illegal. Hostility grew and grew until an officer shoved a queen, who responded by hitting him on the head with her purse. The crowd became fierce. Cops were pelted, first with coins and then with bottles and stones. When a bull-dyke resisting arrest called to the crowd for support, the situation exploded. The crowd tried to topple the paddy wagon while the police vehicles got their tires slashed. The crowd, already throwing beer bottles, discovered a cache of bricks at a construction site. Cops were forced to barricade themselves inside the Inn. Garbage cans, garbage, bottles, rocks, and bricks were hurled at the building, breaking the windows. Rioters ripped up a parking meter and used it as a battering ram. The mob lit garbage on fire and sent it through the broken windows; squirted lighter fluid inside and lit it. Riot police arrived on the scene, but were unable to regain control of the situation. Drag queens danced a conga line and sang songs amidst the street fighting to mock the inability of the police to re-establish order. The rioting continued until dawn, and for the next four days. Crowds filled the streets and smashed more cop cars, set more fires, and looted stores.
1970 – New York City. Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, veterans of the Stonewall riots, formed the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR). Marsha and Sylvia opened the STAR house for homeless drag queens and runaway queer youth to stay in. The house mothers hustled to pay rent so their kids wouldn’t have to. The youth, in turn, stole food to bring home. STAR linked up with the Young Lords, a revolutionary Puerto Rican group, and with the Black Panther Party.
http://gendermutiny.wordpress.com/
Spomenik
Check that motherfucker out! That is truly, in the original sense of the word, epic. If only if it wasn't tied to so much pain and tragedy.
See more of them Brutalist monuments over nhya.
Upon arrival
You check your instruments. You check your instruments again even though the AI is perfectly capable of monitoring everything much better than you. It's not that you don't trust it, how could you not trust it, you're just nervous. And scared. Not of them, not of what they might do to you if they catch up to what you've done or figure out where you're going. You're scared of what is left behind. A life of disappointment, being beaten into dank submission, ennui and boredom. You're almost elated, relieved that the fear you felt before today, that nagging feeling of discontent tugging at your entrails has now metamorphosed into something new. Your fear has become a force of survival. An instinct rather than a reminder. Now your fear lets you know you're still alive, before, it only let you know you weren't dead.
Your mind is racing with all the possibilities. All the choices, all the desires that can now be fulfilled. You've been planning this relocation for months. You've done all the research. You know what to do. And even if you didn't, the prototype super-AI you stole would. Now you can say that word too, steal, and you can say it without it meaning injustice. Now it means taking back what's yours. What didn't belong where it was. Relocating. Liberating. The AI will help you, not start over, but continue. Improve. Correct all the mistakes you know of and find even more. Together you'll build a new world on top of the old one's ruins. Together, you'll turn the present into archaeology. This is what you've been hoping, yearning, living for.
You feel a bit sad about everyone and everything you left behind but that's a small sadness. It's the sadness of your favourite grandmother that died twenty years ago. The kind of sadness that is reassuring, stroking your back while whispering in your ear, you're doing ok, keep it up, move on. So you do. You keep going, you move.
The trip will take a while. Everything has been precalculated several times over. Doublechecked and triplechecked and verified. Until you reach the opaque upper layer of the planet's atmosphere, you know exactly what to do and what is going to happen. The entering and the landing, that's another matter. You know nothing about that. The AI knows a few things, it has calculated and simulated and extrapolated. But you don't care about that. You want to see with your eyes. Feel and sense and devour with every single channel of perception that you can. This new place. This new home.
You're getting closer. You try to think of something in your memories, your past to compare this to but you can't. The closest you can get is the moment before a massive orgasm. The instant when everything in you clenches as hard as it can in preparation of the internal sensory explosion that happens immediately after, that is if you're fucking with a good lover. You smirk at your own thoughts. And the smile is quickly replaced by a shadow of regret. You're going to miss the sex. Whether sweet, slow and loving or hard and dirty, you're going to miss it at least for a while.
It's here. The moment. Now it starts. You look at the screen, your eyes hungry. In front of you a big blanket of gas. Broiling pinkish gray masses shifting and pulsing and meshing with each other. This is the first frontier. After this the unknown. Your breath is shallow, anxious, almost unwilling to enter your lungs. You feel a pressure on your skin right above your bladder. Fuck that, you think to yourself, I'd rather piss myself than miss this. You're in the clouds now. Mammoth clouds. Clouds like mountains, like valleys in old books, endless, without time. Your neuromesh reminds your body to breathe deeper, slower, if you want to retain consciousness. You pace yourself and wait. Wait for the clouds to end. For the light at the end.
You wait.
And then.
Home.
Your feet hurt and your calves and your hips. In fact, everything hurts. It would take less time to try and list the things on your body that don't hurt. You need this. Your pain is new, just like your fear, it is now a sister, not an enemy. A friend that warns you when you've gone too far. And you have. While the AI has been busy building you a companion-droid and several Beast-Of-Burden ones for itself, you have been exploring. First, the landing site. Then the thickets all around you. Then with your companion-droid, it calls itself Can'Kay, you went to the closest river for what it called a reconnaissance mission and what you called skinny-dipping while the AI and its BOBs built you a low-impact underground shelter. After that came the big trek up the hill. You named the hill Mammatus after the searing memory of the clouds on your entry. Your pain is satisfying. It's the kind of pain that drives you nose-first into the deepest, most satisfying sleep. No dreams, no turning, just blackness, void and the next morning nothing but love for returning to consciousness. You can't help but feel that this is how every person in the universe should wake up every morning. With a deep burning desire to not spend another moment asleep, hurting to grab a big, lusty handful of life's ass.
The view from the hill is amazing, thick forests, almost tropical, big bodies of water crazily slashing and cutting at the land like drunken abstractionist painters. At the distance, movement. Life. Grazing figures lazily shifting on the luminous grass.
That was good. That was too good. You would feel naughty if you were a different kind of person. But you're you and you feel good about yourself. You also feel good about the slamming orgasm you just had. It had been too long without a decent train wreck of an orgasm. Thank fuck for Penis Valley. You smile and giggle inside. You think that's funny. Penis Valley. Not the name though, the fact that there is a place that warrants it. You found it a few weeks after landing. A big wide plain showered with light. Full of strange protuberances. Mushroom-like growths from the ground with a wide, round, flat base that narrowed quickly into a thick stem and rose insolently towards the sky. Widening slightly at the top to look like narrower and elongated mushrooms. You thought how weird, they look like cocks. It had been too long. You started touching yourself. You took of your clothes. The droid stared emptily at you, having even less inhibitions than you. You walked up to the one that was closest and then your body took over. You stood above it, spread your legs slightly apart and slowly lowered yourself onto it. It felt alive inside you, not like a companion, warm and comforting, but cool and playful like a flower. At the end, you clenched while your world was dismantled and put back together in an instant. You felt something shooting inside you. It wasn't upsetting but you had your neuromesh analyse it anyway. It wasn't dangerous. You asked it to get rid of it anyway and send the analysis results back to the AI for further research.
You then forgot completely about that and concentrated at the warm feeling left in your belly. It felt good. You caught a rogue thought speeding through your mind. Children. Little, loud versions of you. You thought, no chance. You could only make clones of yourself. You never thought sperm would be a necessity for colonising a planet. You couldn't get enough variation on your genetic material to produce babies without the danger of a multitude of syndromes.
Unless...
You notice all the little details. Your toenails are beautifully trimmed. You didn't do that, the neuromesh did. It dictates the speed at which everything in your body works. You've had the same haircut for three years now and it looks just as good as it did when you got it. Your bum has started to get sore from siting on the same seat for too long. You put your feet up and you think you can smell them. Your sense of smell has become insane. You think you can smell water and metals and a lot of other stuff that you know you shouldn't be able to smell. Your neuromesh turns it down a bit. You sigh in relief. The room seems a bit bare now that you think about it. Just not right. The floor would be too cold. No it wouldn't. You fidget internally. You wish you had someone to snap to. The droids are no good. They seem genuinely hurt and they never snap back which makes you feel like shit about yourself.
You concentrate on the seven little ones. Snug inside you. You get up. Fuck this. You're not a fucking incubator with legs. You're going for a walk and a swim. Maybe a fuck too.
Your mind is racing with all the possibilities. All the choices, all the desires that can now be fulfilled. You've been planning this relocation for months. You've done all the research. You know what to do. And even if you didn't, the prototype super-AI you stole would. Now you can say that word too, steal, and you can say it without it meaning injustice. Now it means taking back what's yours. What didn't belong where it was. Relocating. Liberating. The AI will help you, not start over, but continue. Improve. Correct all the mistakes you know of and find even more. Together you'll build a new world on top of the old one's ruins. Together, you'll turn the present into archaeology. This is what you've been hoping, yearning, living for.
You feel a bit sad about everyone and everything you left behind but that's a small sadness. It's the sadness of your favourite grandmother that died twenty years ago. The kind of sadness that is reassuring, stroking your back while whispering in your ear, you're doing ok, keep it up, move on. So you do. You keep going, you move.
The trip will take a while. Everything has been precalculated several times over. Doublechecked and triplechecked and verified. Until you reach the opaque upper layer of the planet's atmosphere, you know exactly what to do and what is going to happen. The entering and the landing, that's another matter. You know nothing about that. The AI knows a few things, it has calculated and simulated and extrapolated. But you don't care about that. You want to see with your eyes. Feel and sense and devour with every single channel of perception that you can. This new place. This new home.
~
You're getting closer. You try to think of something in your memories, your past to compare this to but you can't. The closest you can get is the moment before a massive orgasm. The instant when everything in you clenches as hard as it can in preparation of the internal sensory explosion that happens immediately after, that is if you're fucking with a good lover. You smirk at your own thoughts. And the smile is quickly replaced by a shadow of regret. You're going to miss the sex. Whether sweet, slow and loving or hard and dirty, you're going to miss it at least for a while.
~
It's here. The moment. Now it starts. You look at the screen, your eyes hungry. In front of you a big blanket of gas. Broiling pinkish gray masses shifting and pulsing and meshing with each other. This is the first frontier. After this the unknown. Your breath is shallow, anxious, almost unwilling to enter your lungs. You feel a pressure on your skin right above your bladder. Fuck that, you think to yourself, I'd rather piss myself than miss this. You're in the clouds now. Mammoth clouds. Clouds like mountains, like valleys in old books, endless, without time. Your neuromesh reminds your body to breathe deeper, slower, if you want to retain consciousness. You pace yourself and wait. Wait for the clouds to end. For the light at the end.
You wait.
And then.
Home.
~
Your feet hurt and your calves and your hips. In fact, everything hurts. It would take less time to try and list the things on your body that don't hurt. You need this. Your pain is new, just like your fear, it is now a sister, not an enemy. A friend that warns you when you've gone too far. And you have. While the AI has been busy building you a companion-droid and several Beast-Of-Burden ones for itself, you have been exploring. First, the landing site. Then the thickets all around you. Then with your companion-droid, it calls itself Can'Kay, you went to the closest river for what it called a reconnaissance mission and what you called skinny-dipping while the AI and its BOBs built you a low-impact underground shelter. After that came the big trek up the hill. You named the hill Mammatus after the searing memory of the clouds on your entry. Your pain is satisfying. It's the kind of pain that drives you nose-first into the deepest, most satisfying sleep. No dreams, no turning, just blackness, void and the next morning nothing but love for returning to consciousness. You can't help but feel that this is how every person in the universe should wake up every morning. With a deep burning desire to not spend another moment asleep, hurting to grab a big, lusty handful of life's ass.
The view from the hill is amazing, thick forests, almost tropical, big bodies of water crazily slashing and cutting at the land like drunken abstractionist painters. At the distance, movement. Life. Grazing figures lazily shifting on the luminous grass.
~
That was good. That was too good. You would feel naughty if you were a different kind of person. But you're you and you feel good about yourself. You also feel good about the slamming orgasm you just had. It had been too long without a decent train wreck of an orgasm. Thank fuck for Penis Valley. You smile and giggle inside. You think that's funny. Penis Valley. Not the name though, the fact that there is a place that warrants it. You found it a few weeks after landing. A big wide plain showered with light. Full of strange protuberances. Mushroom-like growths from the ground with a wide, round, flat base that narrowed quickly into a thick stem and rose insolently towards the sky. Widening slightly at the top to look like narrower and elongated mushrooms. You thought how weird, they look like cocks. It had been too long. You started touching yourself. You took of your clothes. The droid stared emptily at you, having even less inhibitions than you. You walked up to the one that was closest and then your body took over. You stood above it, spread your legs slightly apart and slowly lowered yourself onto it. It felt alive inside you, not like a companion, warm and comforting, but cool and playful like a flower. At the end, you clenched while your world was dismantled and put back together in an instant. You felt something shooting inside you. It wasn't upsetting but you had your neuromesh analyse it anyway. It wasn't dangerous. You asked it to get rid of it anyway and send the analysis results back to the AI for further research.
You then forgot completely about that and concentrated at the warm feeling left in your belly. It felt good. You caught a rogue thought speeding through your mind. Children. Little, loud versions of you. You thought, no chance. You could only make clones of yourself. You never thought sperm would be a necessity for colonising a planet. You couldn't get enough variation on your genetic material to produce babies without the danger of a multitude of syndromes.
Unless...
~
You notice all the little details. Your toenails are beautifully trimmed. You didn't do that, the neuromesh did. It dictates the speed at which everything in your body works. You've had the same haircut for three years now and it looks just as good as it did when you got it. Your bum has started to get sore from siting on the same seat for too long. You put your feet up and you think you can smell them. Your sense of smell has become insane. You think you can smell water and metals and a lot of other stuff that you know you shouldn't be able to smell. Your neuromesh turns it down a bit. You sigh in relief. The room seems a bit bare now that you think about it. Just not right. The floor would be too cold. No it wouldn't. You fidget internally. You wish you had someone to snap to. The droids are no good. They seem genuinely hurt and they never snap back which makes you feel like shit about yourself.
You concentrate on the seven little ones. Snug inside you. You get up. Fuck this. You're not a fucking incubator with legs. You're going for a walk and a swim. Maybe a fuck too.
Words Don't Work
They don't, do they? Not always. Just when it's most important that they do work, they fail. Consider the use of words in arguments. From personal experience and from what others have communicated to me over the years words are never enough to shift someone's worldview. And how could they? We grow up in complex systems which give rise to well rooted, ingrained ideas. You think a well thought out, well researched and well presented argument is enough to change that? Fuck no! That would be reasonable.
Look at the world around you, it's full of ideas that shouldn't exist. Control, hierarchy, oppression, prejudice, domination, authority. But these ideas exist and it looks like no amount of argument is going to change that. So if words aren't any good, what's left? Actions I hear you cry in my head, and can you please stop it?
Actions affect the tangible world and everything in it. But what happens if what you want to eradicate an idea? Not make it vanish, because that would deny people choice. Not matter how idiotic an idea may seem you have to be able to choose not to follow it to make the result worth anything at all. What good is it to not be a racist if there's only one race or not be a sexist if there's only one gender? Crude examples I know but the reasoning behind them is sound. But what happens if you want to reveal the shittiness in an idea? To make it clear for everyone to see and to make it a horrible choice. Surely that would be enough to make an idea wither and die, right?
To cut a long story short, I want to know how we can kill ideas. Words don't seem to work and actions have an equally long history, if not longer, of not working. So consider this a call for developing an armoury for fighting ideas. We need it.
Look at the world around you, it's full of ideas that shouldn't exist. Control, hierarchy, oppression, prejudice, domination, authority. But these ideas exist and it looks like no amount of argument is going to change that. So if words aren't any good, what's left? Actions I hear you cry in my head, and can you please stop it?
Actions affect the tangible world and everything in it. But what happens if what you want to eradicate an idea? Not make it vanish, because that would deny people choice. Not matter how idiotic an idea may seem you have to be able to choose not to follow it to make the result worth anything at all. What good is it to not be a racist if there's only one race or not be a sexist if there's only one gender? Crude examples I know but the reasoning behind them is sound. But what happens if you want to reveal the shittiness in an idea? To make it clear for everyone to see and to make it a horrible choice. Surely that would be enough to make an idea wither and die, right?
To cut a long story short, I want to know how we can kill ideas. Words don't seem to work and actions have an equally long history, if not longer, of not working. So consider this a call for developing an armoury for fighting ideas. We need it.
Dump
Soma was a dump. A waste disposal facility. No. The word "facility" implies some sort of scheme, a tactic, it gives it a sense of process. There was deliberation here but nothing formally organised. Everything was just dumped here. First the endless megatons of "unwanted" food. Then residual nuclear waste. After that, chronodebris created by the first, unsuccessful experiments in controlled time travel. Everything that was discarded or deemed useless. Everything that defined people, because as any good historian or archaeologist will tell you, what else serves as our definition, what are we, if not what we leave behind. Every single disposed of item, ended here. For several decades, in Standard Objective Time that is, this planet was one of the countless, and ultimately unidentifiable, dumping grounds of the destructive force that was our ancestors.
For several centuries, no one knew what the surface even looked like and after the first few decades it would probably be virtually impossible to find out without landing since the upper layers of Soma's atmosphere became opaque with the gaseous byproducts of decomposition on a massive scale. No landing attempts were ever recorded, everything was shot at the planet's surface from orbit. This was thought to be the most "cost effective" course of action. It is estimated that over the course of two-hundred and seventy three SOT years, more than half of the Originating System's waste and "big science" experimental byproducts ended up on the planet's surface. Running a few crude calculations shows that today, even after taking into account of the rate of decay and decomposition of organic and inorganic matter and the half-life of radioactive material, we should be at least up to our necks in garbage. Anywhere on the planet. By the way, this is why the dumping stopped. Our ancestors ran the same calculations and found out that any more and they might disturb the planet's orbit. Not that they cared that much about the planet's well-being, but even they weren't stupid enough to risk having a planet leave its place in their vicinity. So what happened? Did we overestimate in our overeager attempt to accuse our ancestors of being, well, the colonialist, imperialist fuckheads that they usually were? The short answer is no. Our calculations are correct within a reasonable margin of error. And our ancestors were indeed fuckheads. However, this knowledge doesn't serve in any way our quest to understand what happened during those two-hundred and seventy three years. Or should I say during this period that could potentially amount to over ten billion Cumulative Standard Subjective Time years?
In the past few years tremendous progress has been made in our attempts to elaborate on the intricacies of the theoretical frameworks of chronobiology and chronogenetics and to unify them with our already extensive understanding of the underlying mechanisms of temporal flow. To put it more simply, we have a way of making some very educated guesses about why we're not buried in trash and at the same time why some of our most beautiful species, including the Dictyum, came to be. We now believe that Soma was pretty much the same as the Originating Planet during what was once termed the Mesozoic era, minus the great-big-fuck-off-scary lizards. More importantly it was a balanced super-ecomatrix. All this was massively upset by our ancestors' firing several hundred megatons of waste at random points and time intervals on the planet's surface. Normally, an ecological disturbance of this magnitude would have flung the entire planet's ecomatrix so far away from equilibrium that not only is it tempting to call this, us, today, a miracle but it also requires a lot of effort to not start listing all the ways by which Soma should have ended up as a barren rock.
Of course we know this is not a miracle, at least not in the way some of our more deluded ancestors would think. This is a miracle because it tells us something. It lets us know that life, sentient or not, is the most persistent force known to us and that once it has established itself it is not willing to go anywhere, it will not budge, not without putting up a good fight.
So far, our research has shown that before the period now colloquially known as the Great Waste, organisms very similar to fungi thrived on Soma. Great mycelial-like networks running under the surface of the planet with properties very similar to those of the Originating Planet. These protofungi were the planet's main force of decomposition. We posit that the waste dumped on Soma, most of the organic and some of the inorganic too, was the nutritional substrate for what would follow. What did follow is probably the biggest chronoevolutionary event that ever happened on Soma and quite possibly anywhere else. The chronodebris fell all over the planet's surface pretty much randomly and in a large fraction of those cases it created pockets of temporal instability. Next, or rather at the same time, came the radioactive waste. This, as unlikely as it may seem, served as a catalyst in what probably is the single most rapid case of evolution. The radioactive material served as a mutagenic factor inside the temporal bubbles created by the chronodebris. That, combined with the fact that there were essentially limitless nutrients lead to the super-rapid evolution of the protofungi. While on the outside of those temporal pockets barely three centuries had passed, on the inside the protofungi fed on the waste while mutating aggressively over what is now calculated to be several millions of ST years. Leaving momentarily aside the fact that this amount of time only makes sense when you're in the time bubble, try and imagine for a minute what that means. Pure, wild evolution. Metamorphosis in fast-forward. If evolution had a goal this would be the equivalent of skipping to the last page to read the ending. In some of those bubbles it is possible that up to a billion years could have passed. Apart from that we can't say much. It's obvious that metafungi evolved in one of those temporal pockets but how they came out of them or how the pockets broke down we have no idea. And they did break down, there is no sign of temporal disturbances on the planet's surface today, at least not of that nature.
Many other species evolved inside those perfect havens of time and space, some of which you are all very familiar with. The most important though is metafungi. The single most significant species on this planet, if not for its present benefits then definitely for what it has offered in the past. A second chance for a planet doomed to die in the ignorant and negligent hands of our ancestors.
-Introductory lecture for the course of Chronoevolution 101, Open Access Horizontal University of Self-Education, Ursula Shelter, Soma
For several centuries, no one knew what the surface even looked like and after the first few decades it would probably be virtually impossible to find out without landing since the upper layers of Soma's atmosphere became opaque with the gaseous byproducts of decomposition on a massive scale. No landing attempts were ever recorded, everything was shot at the planet's surface from orbit. This was thought to be the most "cost effective" course of action. It is estimated that over the course of two-hundred and seventy three SOT years, more than half of the Originating System's waste and "big science" experimental byproducts ended up on the planet's surface. Running a few crude calculations shows that today, even after taking into account of the rate of decay and decomposition of organic and inorganic matter and the half-life of radioactive material, we should be at least up to our necks in garbage. Anywhere on the planet. By the way, this is why the dumping stopped. Our ancestors ran the same calculations and found out that any more and they might disturb the planet's orbit. Not that they cared that much about the planet's well-being, but even they weren't stupid enough to risk having a planet leave its place in their vicinity. So what happened? Did we overestimate in our overeager attempt to accuse our ancestors of being, well, the colonialist, imperialist fuckheads that they usually were? The short answer is no. Our calculations are correct within a reasonable margin of error. And our ancestors were indeed fuckheads. However, this knowledge doesn't serve in any way our quest to understand what happened during those two-hundred and seventy three years. Or should I say during this period that could potentially amount to over ten billion Cumulative Standard Subjective Time years?
In the past few years tremendous progress has been made in our attempts to elaborate on the intricacies of the theoretical frameworks of chronobiology and chronogenetics and to unify them with our already extensive understanding of the underlying mechanisms of temporal flow. To put it more simply, we have a way of making some very educated guesses about why we're not buried in trash and at the same time why some of our most beautiful species, including the Dictyum, came to be. We now believe that Soma was pretty much the same as the Originating Planet during what was once termed the Mesozoic era, minus the great-big-fuck-off-scary lizards. More importantly it was a balanced super-ecomatrix. All this was massively upset by our ancestors' firing several hundred megatons of waste at random points and time intervals on the planet's surface. Normally, an ecological disturbance of this magnitude would have flung the entire planet's ecomatrix so far away from equilibrium that not only is it tempting to call this, us, today, a miracle but it also requires a lot of effort to not start listing all the ways by which Soma should have ended up as a barren rock.
Of course we know this is not a miracle, at least not in the way some of our more deluded ancestors would think. This is a miracle because it tells us something. It lets us know that life, sentient or not, is the most persistent force known to us and that once it has established itself it is not willing to go anywhere, it will not budge, not without putting up a good fight.
So far, our research has shown that before the period now colloquially known as the Great Waste, organisms very similar to fungi thrived on Soma. Great mycelial-like networks running under the surface of the planet with properties very similar to those of the Originating Planet. These protofungi were the planet's main force of decomposition. We posit that the waste dumped on Soma, most of the organic and some of the inorganic too, was the nutritional substrate for what would follow. What did follow is probably the biggest chronoevolutionary event that ever happened on Soma and quite possibly anywhere else. The chronodebris fell all over the planet's surface pretty much randomly and in a large fraction of those cases it created pockets of temporal instability. Next, or rather at the same time, came the radioactive waste. This, as unlikely as it may seem, served as a catalyst in what probably is the single most rapid case of evolution. The radioactive material served as a mutagenic factor inside the temporal bubbles created by the chronodebris. That, combined with the fact that there were essentially limitless nutrients lead to the super-rapid evolution of the protofungi. While on the outside of those temporal pockets barely three centuries had passed, on the inside the protofungi fed on the waste while mutating aggressively over what is now calculated to be several millions of ST years. Leaving momentarily aside the fact that this amount of time only makes sense when you're in the time bubble, try and imagine for a minute what that means. Pure, wild evolution. Metamorphosis in fast-forward. If evolution had a goal this would be the equivalent of skipping to the last page to read the ending. In some of those bubbles it is possible that up to a billion years could have passed. Apart from that we can't say much. It's obvious that metafungi evolved in one of those temporal pockets but how they came out of them or how the pockets broke down we have no idea. And they did break down, there is no sign of temporal disturbances on the planet's surface today, at least not of that nature.
Many other species evolved inside those perfect havens of time and space, some of which you are all very familiar with. The most important though is metafungi. The single most significant species on this planet, if not for its present benefits then definitely for what it has offered in the past. A second chance for a planet doomed to die in the ignorant and negligent hands of our ancestors.
-Introductory lecture for the course of Chronoevolution 101, Open Access Horizontal University of Self-Education, Ursula Shelter, Soma
Pigs in Blankets
That’s what Doug Stanhope called the imaginary charity gig he did for police officers fallen in the line of duty. That opener should have got rid of the cop sympathisers among you and for those of you reading still on the fence here’s another one, more succinct and one that leaves no doubt about where I stand on the issue of police. I shit on the grave of fallen police officers.
But seriously, let’s analyse this lest we make ourselves look as dumb as the pigs. The first and extremely common argument about cops, living or dead, is that they are people like us. Ha! I say to thee. Let’s just find out. I’m not going to quote the numbers that show the grief and malignancy caused by cops, oh no, because you can argue numbers. In fact, I’m not going to refer to anything you can argue about. Instead, I will talk about things that no matter how good a debater you might think you are (even a master debater, heh) you will have to accept as general truths or otherwise reveal what an idiot you are. So without further ado, what makes us human?
The common things among all people are our fundamental human needs. These, according to the school of "Human Scale Development" developed by Manfred Max-Neef and others (Antonio Elizalde and Martin Hopenhayn), are seen as stemming from the condition of being human. They are subsistence, protection, affection, understanding, participation, leisure, creation, identity and freedom. For the time being we can ignore subsistence, protection and understanding, not because they’re not important or for any silly reason like that but because they’re not really unique to us humans. Animals fulfill these needs every day so I don’t think we can use them as something that makes us stand out as humans. The same is probably true of affection but I chose to leave that in, if only slightly facetiously, in order to poke further fun at the argument that “cops are people just like us”. So let’s pick at each of them one by one.
Oh look, the first one is affection. Do I really need to analyse that? Is there anywhere on this planet where cops are known for how sweet and cuddly they are? No, I didn’t think so. They might have a deep need for affection that they hide very, very well but it is most definitely something that does not go well at all with their role and it is probably stamped on early on, either at a young age in their family or later on in their training or maybe even both.
Next up is participation. This may appear to be somehow fulfilled by the illusion of police being an integral part of society but nothing is further from the truth. Cops are elitists. They are their own special little boys’ club. More importantly though they exist because society is elitist and it wants to stay that way. The haves are protected from the have-nots and those higher up on the hierarchy need someone to do their dirty work and manage the chaos created by those lower down. For all intents and purposes, there is no organisation more segregationist than the police. And that is most likely true on an individual level. We’ve all seen and heard of “corrupt” cops but when was the last time you heard of a cop fighting for the rights of immigrants, or women, or children, or animals? Even if by some miracle you did find some, they would only highlight their rarity. The only thing cops are interested in participating in is the police and its purpose.
To show you that I am not prejudiced however, I will give them leisure. Although I don’t believe that one is limited to humans either, it is I feel a connecting point among absolutely all humans. Everyone, absolutely everyone, wants a break once and a while no matter how much fun they’re having with a task. Not even machines can run forever.
Creation. This is my favourite. I’m going to let you do the thinking for this one though because I feel it illustrates my point perfectly. What is it that cops create? What do they make? No, really, think about it. That’s right, absolutely fucking nothing. They are a bunch of bloodsucking parasites.
As far as identity goes, please no more, this is too much. The police, as much as any other kind of army, wants you to be a number not a person. They want individuality set aside and they want each cop to work like a well-oiled cog in the machine of state-sponsored repression. There is no identity in the police, you are whatever your commanding officer tells you you are. If cops need to find an identity then they’re looking in the wrong place.
And last but not least, freedom. I don’t know how to talk about this one without laughing. Seriously, I need to argue about this one too? Get the fuck out. Police for freedom would really be like fucking for virginity.
So that’s one stupid argument down, about a million more to go. Let’s take a break now, fulfill our need of leisure, possibly the only thing that we and the pigs have in common and we’ll come back with even more cop-apologist bashing.
But seriously, let’s analyse this lest we make ourselves look as dumb as the pigs. The first and extremely common argument about cops, living or dead, is that they are people like us. Ha! I say to thee. Let’s just find out. I’m not going to quote the numbers that show the grief and malignancy caused by cops, oh no, because you can argue numbers. In fact, I’m not going to refer to anything you can argue about. Instead, I will talk about things that no matter how good a debater you might think you are (even a master debater, heh) you will have to accept as general truths or otherwise reveal what an idiot you are. So without further ado, what makes us human?
The common things among all people are our fundamental human needs. These, according to the school of "Human Scale Development" developed by Manfred Max-Neef and others (Antonio Elizalde and Martin Hopenhayn), are seen as stemming from the condition of being human. They are subsistence, protection, affection, understanding, participation, leisure, creation, identity and freedom. For the time being we can ignore subsistence, protection and understanding, not because they’re not important or for any silly reason like that but because they’re not really unique to us humans. Animals fulfill these needs every day so I don’t think we can use them as something that makes us stand out as humans. The same is probably true of affection but I chose to leave that in, if only slightly facetiously, in order to poke further fun at the argument that “cops are people just like us”. So let’s pick at each of them one by one.
Oh look, the first one is affection. Do I really need to analyse that? Is there anywhere on this planet where cops are known for how sweet and cuddly they are? No, I didn’t think so. They might have a deep need for affection that they hide very, very well but it is most definitely something that does not go well at all with their role and it is probably stamped on early on, either at a young age in their family or later on in their training or maybe even both.
Next up is participation. This may appear to be somehow fulfilled by the illusion of police being an integral part of society but nothing is further from the truth. Cops are elitists. They are their own special little boys’ club. More importantly though they exist because society is elitist and it wants to stay that way. The haves are protected from the have-nots and those higher up on the hierarchy need someone to do their dirty work and manage the chaos created by those lower down. For all intents and purposes, there is no organisation more segregationist than the police. And that is most likely true on an individual level. We’ve all seen and heard of “corrupt” cops but when was the last time you heard of a cop fighting for the rights of immigrants, or women, or children, or animals? Even if by some miracle you did find some, they would only highlight their rarity. The only thing cops are interested in participating in is the police and its purpose.
To show you that I am not prejudiced however, I will give them leisure. Although I don’t believe that one is limited to humans either, it is I feel a connecting point among absolutely all humans. Everyone, absolutely everyone, wants a break once and a while no matter how much fun they’re having with a task. Not even machines can run forever.
Creation. This is my favourite. I’m going to let you do the thinking for this one though because I feel it illustrates my point perfectly. What is it that cops create? What do they make? No, really, think about it. That’s right, absolutely fucking nothing. They are a bunch of bloodsucking parasites.
As far as identity goes, please no more, this is too much. The police, as much as any other kind of army, wants you to be a number not a person. They want individuality set aside and they want each cop to work like a well-oiled cog in the machine of state-sponsored repression. There is no identity in the police, you are whatever your commanding officer tells you you are. If cops need to find an identity then they’re looking in the wrong place.
And last but not least, freedom. I don’t know how to talk about this one without laughing. Seriously, I need to argue about this one too? Get the fuck out. Police for freedom would really be like fucking for virginity.
So that’s one stupid argument down, about a million more to go. Let’s take a break now, fulfill our need of leisure, possibly the only thing that we and the pigs have in common and we’ll come back with even more cop-apologist bashing.
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