This post contains 18+ content. You can view it if you're over 18.
So Willem Arondeus was a dutch gay artist and author in Nazi Occupied Amsterdam who forged fake documents to help people escape the Nazis and organized an incredible arson campaign to destroy the Nazi building housing all the records getting used to round people up for the Holocaust. His final words were "Let nobody say that homosexuals are cowards"
One of the noves he wrote as an author, before the Nazis took over, was called Het Uilenhuis ("The Owl House")
This is a really important article. As social media has empowered marginalised groups in the imperial core to speak up about our conditions over the last decade or so, the institutions of ideological control - academia, professional national journalism and punditry, and political parties - have wrung their hands with greater and greater theatricality about 'polarisation', i.e. the idea that 'our' ability to be nice to one another and not make one another feel bad has been diminished by changing norms of social discourse as a result of technological shifts (social media is the usual, but not the only, scapegoat). 'Our' in this case indexes the participants in public discourse, I think.
This paper eviscerates that argument, showing that, to put in bluntly, the problem is not polarisation but injustice, and what the 'polarisation' hand-wringers are responding to is in fact having to think more often about the material circumstances of the oppressed groups on whose exploitation their comfort depends. In a sense, this is the argument of King's Letter From A Birmingham Jail, presented in a 21st-century academic mode and with a citational apparatus tuned for that context: that the white establishment values 'order' over justice, and would rather rest in the absence of conflict than accept the disruption to their status quo required for the presence of justice.
I could pick nits with the paper here and there (it's a little soft, I think, on anti-black backlash within the Democratic Party in America), but I strongly recommend reading it and keeping it somewhere handy to trot out next time someone you know complains about how 'mean' or 'intolerant' left-wing activists have 'become'.
good time to remind people that i am still looking for work
functional programming, web dev, writing, voice work
whatever's stable enough to buy me a lease somewhere that's not trying to kill me
plzthx