What I did find were many vibrant and surprisingly active communities of the Post-Left; anti-civilization eco-anarchist groups scattered across various chat servers. Their style is witty and cutthroat, radically inclusive, multicultural, LGBTQ, pro-diversity, posting twenty-four hours a day at the speed of 4chan; “race/class/gender is a social construct and we must do away with all of it.”
They reject traditional strategies of collective bargaining and coalition building. They conceive of markets as, essentially, ahead of regulation. ‘How can progressivism be progressive if regulation itself is reactionary?’ Technological progress creates new markets faster than they can be regulated. Civilization means an inevitable drift to the right. Anything other than dismantling civilization is only a temporary stop-gap which by design cannot hold back the brutal efficiency of capitalist acceleration.
We have to change a lot very fast and we can’t do it with capitalism
[Economies] need to transform the ways in which energy, transport, food , and housing are produced and consumed (O’Neill et al. 2018). The result should be production and consumption that provides decent opportunities for a good life while dramatically reducing the burden on natural ecosystems. In terms of greenhouse gases, global net emissions should be zero around 2050 – in Europe and the US by around 2040. (Rockström et al . 2017)
Disabled bodies in the apocalypse
Disabled people don’t make it through the apocalypse. At least that’s the conventional wisdom of both speculative fiction and our own world: If the biomedical industrial complex collapses, so do all the people who rely on its products. Corporations need us to believe this, yes, but it’s hard to deny the truth of it. If pharmaceutical companies like Eli Lilly, Novo Nordisk, and Sanofi were unable to continue manufacturing insulin, or if it became so scarce as to be affordable only to the investors and technocrats packing their bags for Mars, I’d be done for in a matter of weeks. It’d be nice to think some miracle collective of anarchist scientists could pop up to take their place, but that’s not how we tend to imagine the end of the world going down. So, while people with disabilities have historically populated film and literature more regularly than any other minority group—frequently as “narrative prostheses” where their bodies become plot-driving problems—they disappear from our postcapitalist futures. That is, unless they’ve been mutilated or mutated by the same catastrophe that caused the world to collapse or they’ve gained some kind of supercrip cyborg body in the chaos. (Think of the double-entendre-ish firearm worn by Furiosa in Mad Max.) Those of us with the kinds of everyday illnesses, dependencies, and access issues that more typically define disability can’t hope to make it into the fast-paced, social-Darwinist worlds of apocalypse movies.
Source: The Cochlear Implant at the End of the World – The New Inquiry
But what if my experience in my disabled body is what saves us?
test
Testing for PteroType.
Increasing housing density along arterial roads just reinforces inequality
Vancouver is densifying in areas that will make people sick and exacerbate inequality.
Vancouver has a housing affordability crisis. They are trying to make homes more affordable by building more of them, and they’re primarily building in dense strips along arterial roads.
New-ish densification at Kingsway and Knight. This intersection is frequently so loud that you can’t have a conversation on the sidewalk or turn up your headphones loudly enough to understand an audiobook.
Living near a road with lots of car traffic is very, very dangerous. The air pollution makes you sick, stupid, and demented. The noise pollution also makes you sick, tired, fat, and dumb. Both take years off of your life.
This housing is still far too expensive for people making the median income in Vancouver to actually buy, but they’re likely to be renting it and some wealthier professionals will likely use it to try to get a foot in the property market. But there’s a real downside to living in these places. As the NYTimes opined yesterday:
The emphasis on vehicle traffic flow is also a perversion of basic social equity, and the costs show up in ways large and small. Vehicles in cities contribute a major portion of small-particle pollution, the kind that penetrates deep into the lungs. (The percentage can reach as high as 49 percent in Phoenix and 55 percent in Los Angeles. It’s just 6 percent in Beijing, but that’s because there are so many other pollution sources.) People living close to busy roads, particularly infants and older people in lower-income households, pay most of the cost in respiratory, cardiovascular and other problems. A 2013 M.I.T. study estimated that vehicle emissions cause 53,000 early deaths a year in the United States, and a study just last month from Lancaster University in Britain found that children with intellectual disabilities are far more likely to live in areas with high levels of vehicle pollution.
Right now, Vancouver’s planning priorities mean that the lower your income, the sicker your home is likely to make you. And being sick makes you poorer. By densifying along roads with lots of car traffic, we’re exacerbating the already deeply problematic wealth inequality in Vancouver. We’re letting a very few people with millions of dollars in assets live in safe parts of the city away from cars and forcing everyone else into homes where they don’t sleep well, where their kids don’t learn well, and where they die years young.
From that same NYTimes opinion, here are a few of the smaller ways prioritizing cars is deeply unfair, expensive, and bad for us all.
- Most people in cities from Bangalore to Brooklyn cannot afford to keep a car, and yet our cities routinely turn over the majority of public thoroughfares to those who can.
- [Parking] means that we often cannot afford room for parks or shade trees, which other studies have repeatedly shown to be an important factor in the health and mental well-being of residents.
- Urban walking has thus deteriorated from a civilized pleasure to an overheated, unshaded, traffic-harried race to a destination.
When you consider the enormous costs and unequal distribution of the negative health effects from reduced exercise, air and noise pollution caused by car traffic, it looks even worse. And that’s completely ignoring the way car-dependence drives up housing costs through parking requirements and damages retail by turning streets into places cars pass through rather than a place people go.
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It doesn’t have to be like this!
Instead of densifying along arterial roads, we could zone areas dominated by single family homes so they can be more like the incredible West End. I think Dunbar is the perfect neighborhood to transform into a dense, livable community.
Both have big, gorgeous trees, unique and personal gardens and quiet streets. Both are next to large, forested, world-class urban parks. Both abut large workplaces (the West End – Downtown and Dunbar – UBC).
But a block in the West End has hundreds of people. A block in Dunbar might have 40.
Density at this corner in the West End is 200-400 people per hectare.
The West End is much more affordable, walkable, and bikeable, and the large population means it can (and does) support many more shops and amenities. Dunbar’s retail areas are very small and have a lot of empty storefronts. The West End isn’t crowded, but you see other people. Dunbar feels dead. Transit in the West End is both more unnecessary and more available than in Dunbar.
Density at this corner in a relatively dense section of Dunbar is 40-50 people per hectare.
Dunbar is more like the West End was a century ago, but the West End changed – and for the better.
The West End community is one of the oldest residential areas in Vancouver. In the late 1890’s and early 20th century, this was the upscale neighbourhood in Vancouver. Many large family mansions were built then slowly replaced by low rise apartment buildings. Today there is a mix of old mansions, homes and heritage apartments throughout the West End.
With good zoning decisions, traffic calming off the arterials, and better transit, Dunbar could become a beloved, quiet, interesting home for tens of thousands more people.
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Another option is to acknowledge that cars make us sick and cost us a ton of money, and that they don’t belong in cities. We could limit or ban private cars entirely in high density areas of the city – I’d start with pretty much all of the downtown and move to much of the Broadway corridor, along parts of Kingsway and Southwest Marine Drive, through much of East Van between Main and Victoria, the Drive and around Nanaimo and Dundas St.
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We can even be truly brave and do both.
Tuesday Shoesday
Drifter – Billie – Two textures Ankle boots
A Culture of No | VQR Online
We have laws requiring us to accept refugees. The laws define refugee very narrowly. These laws aren’t being followed by the people tasked with implementing and enforcing them.
Isaac arrived from Syria, a country with a relatively developed infrastructure before the war. With the help of his family back home, who mailed materials to support his asylum claim, Isaac could produce a passport, a birth certificate, a personal-identification card, high school and university diplomas, university records, a baptism certificate, a letter from his hometown priest (who called Isaac his “son in spirit” and asked that the reader “extend help to him according to his need”), a business license, and a military-recruitment booklet that exempted him, year after year, until 2016, when he was ordered to report for mandatory service.
Most promising, Isaac fit neatly into the definition of a refugee. Asylum law can skirt issues of morality, even logic, and can ultimately rest on the technical elements of a case. And technically, asylum law was designed for someone just like Isaac—a targeted religious minority from a country in the midst of a civil war.
…
To beat the extreme odds in El Paso, Isaac had spent fifteen months in detention and paid thousands of dollars in legal fees to an elite lawyer who then worked dozens of pro bono hours on his appeal. This feat required an enormous amount of translated and notarized evidence discretely sent overseas by family members in Syria, the emotional and financial support of his brother and his lawyer, and the wherewithal to withstand a complex, taxing, humiliating process. How many asylum seekers could or should have to endure such an ordeal in order to gain internationally recognized rights meant to protect the persecuted?
via A Culture of No | VQR Online
A condensed version of this article was published in The Guardian if you don’t have time for such a long read. They mostly excised details of why refugees were seeking asylum, how asylum law works, and details of the research supporting their reporting that the El Paso courts are not doing their jobs and just sending legit refugees to their deaths.
But I found this summary of our current refugee immigration law in the VQR article useful:
Modern refugee law was codified by the United Nations after World War II, when countries grappled with the fact that they had turned away Jews and other vulnerable people fleeing persecution and death. The law’s core principle is that of non-refoulement: the practice of not returning a refugee to a home country in which he has been harmed or has a well-founded fear of future harm. A refugee, according to the 1951 UN Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, is “an individual who is outside his or her country of nationality or habitual residence who is unable or unwilling to return due to a well-founded fear of persecution based on his or her race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group.” Technically, Isaac wouldn’t be a refugee if he had simply fled beatings, shootings, and death threats. He needed to prove that he had fled beatings, shootings, and death threats because he was Christian. To be granted asylum, one must demonstrate the existence of “nexus”—the point at which a person’s identity (as embodied in the five categories) and the reason for his terror meet.
“Yes, you were shot and killed and raped, but not because of your political opinion,” Spector told me with exasperation. “Horrible things happen and the judge’s biggest problem is nexus.”
Indeed, nexus eludes many contemporary immigrants seeking relief, such as those fleeing landscapes decimated by climate change or countries wracked with poverty, corruption, starvation, or widespread gender-based violence. Even those who have been targeted by Mexican and Central American cartels and gangs—a major influx, especially in recent years—often find themselves ineligible for legal forms of protection. Simply being born in a violent country—even facing real threats of harm—doesn’t qualify. Few Mexicans and Central Americans can demonstrate a claim of persecution that is due to race or nationality or religion. Few, too, can meet the burden of proving that their persecution is due to political opinion or membership in a particular social group, since such a group must be socially distinct and fundamental to a respondent’s identity. Being, say, a Honduran who is harmed because he refuses to join a gang is not enough. So most Mexicans and Central Americans coming to the US to escape gangs and drug cartels may be unlucky, even fatally so, but unless they’re being harmed on one of the five grounds, they have few avenues for relief.
Asylum offers an immigrant protection and significant benefits: asylum for spouses and children, permanent residency and eventual citizenship, social services, and travel documents. When applying for asylum, an immigrant also often applies simultaneously for two other types of fear-based relief—Withholding of Removal and protection under the Convention Against Torture—that involve more onerous burdens of proof, are hardly ever granted, and do not offer all of the advantages of asylum, though they do offer the potential for work authorization. Still, many people who will likely be harmed once deported do not qualify for any of these forms of relief, and a judge can—and sometimes must—deny them protection.