Yeah Nah Pasaran! #032 w Seyward Darby on Sisters in Hate : August 20, 2020

Posted on August 17, 2020 by @ndy

On this week’s episode of Yeah Nah, we talk to Seyward Darby [Twitter], a writer and editor who’s just recently had published Sisters in Hate: American Women on the Front Lines of White Nationalism (Little, Brown & Co., 2020):

Journalist Seyward Darby’s “masterfully reported and incisive” (Nell Irvin Painter) exposé pulls back the curtain on modern racial and political extremism in America telling the “eye-opening and unforgettable” (Ibram X. Kendi) account of three women immersed in the white nationalist movement.After the election of Donald J. Trump, journalist Seyward Darby went looking for the women of the so-called “alt-right” — really just white nationalism with a new label. The mainstream media depicted the alt-right as a bastion of angry white men, but was it? As women headlined resistance to the Trump administration’s bigotry and sexism, most notably at the Women’s Marches, Darby wanted to know why others were joining a movement espousing racism and anti-feminism. Who were these women, and what did their activism reveal about America’s past, present, and future?

The three case studies in the book are of Corinna Olsen, Ayla ‘Wife With A Purpose’ Stewart and Lana Lokteff. You can read reviews of Seyward’s book (it’s highly-recommended) via her website, but as an aside: in the chapter on Olsen, reference is made to the shooting of Luke Querner in Portland in March 2010, an incident which I’d forgotten until prompted; late last year, Wife With A Purpose seems to have abandoned her propaganda; local nazi Blair Cottrell was a guest on Lokteff’s show (deleted from Facebook and YouTube, but still supported by Twitter) back in September 2017.

*Please note that the podcats version of this episode contains a slightly longer discussion with Seyward.*

4.30pm, Thursday, August 20, 2020 /// 3CR /// 855AM / streaming live on the 3CR website

• We also have a Facebook page for the show, which you’re invited to ‘Like’ and to ‘Follow’.
• I have a Patreon account which youse are also invited to support.

Posted in Anti-fascism, History, Media, Sex & Sexuality, State / Politics, That's Capitalism!, War on Terror | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Hi Dr Nick!

Posted on August 15, 2020 by @ndy

[Update (August 19, 2020) : ‘But perhaps the most disquieting effect of the prevailing attitude that racism always can, and should, be debated, is the way in which it has allowed the far-right to claim that they are being ‘cancelled’ if minorities refuse to dutifully engage with them. Even if the topic of the debate is said minorities’ right to exist’; CANCELLED: How the far right stole free speech, Ben Turner, swlondoner, August 18, 2020.]

Dear Nick,

I read your reply to Valerio and Frances on the subject of mercy and cancel culture with some interest, and so too the frenzied reaction. That said …

While ‘free-ranging conversation’ can be fun, critical inquiry is a process that should be at the heart of developing any worthwhile argument or interesting thesis. It allows for the honest scrutiny and marshalling of evidence for or against any particular view. Without critical scrutiny, we lose our ability to make sense of the world and to act upon it, and so risk being devoured by the unthinking machinery of chaos and oppression.

Yet criticism doesn’t exist in a vacuum, especially when understood as a form of ‘collective discovery’. It’s a form of public engagement that we must nurture in good faith. To ‘play gracefully with ideas’ requires more than mutualism, and in order to breathe we must be free in mind and body; a condition which, to put it mildly, is unevenly distributed.

Nick, you’ve lamented the existence of something called ‘cancel culture’. While Donald Trump reckons cancel culture is ‘the very definition of totalitarianism’, you’ve not specified precisely what you mean by this term, simply contrasting it with a moral value, ‘mercy’, and associating it with another term, ‘political correctness’. According to you, these politics and this culture have been allowed to run amuck, and the result of this unchecked rampage has endangered art, truth and the imagination.

But what, precisely, are the ‘uncomfortable ideas’ that cancel culture and political correctness have prevented the expression of? According to you, political correctness is a ‘once honourable attempt to reimagine our society in a more equitable way’. I’d suggest that Stewart Lee was probably closer to the truth when he remarked that it’s ‘an often clumsy negotiation towards a kind of formally inclusive language’. It may be that your thoughts on cancel culture were inspired by ‘A Letter on Justice and Open Debate’ published by Harper’s Magazine in July. Or perhaps you remain resentful of the criticism you received for touring Israel in 2017.

I dunno.

In 2018, Jonah Engel Bromwich wrote that ‘cancelled’ is a word that ‘refers to total disinvestment in something (anything), and this usage can be traced back several years. But in the last few months, it’s been everywhere. The most popular definition of the concept on Urban Dictionary was posted in March and four of the nine definitions listed were added in just the last two years.’ The first instance of it I found on Twitter was in October 2016.

As far as I can tell, ‘cancel culture’ is in reality something of a shibboleth, and very far from the central crisis of contemporary politics⁠.

Where are we? I dunno about you, but I’m Melbourne, under lockdown. That’s because there’s a global pandemic raging. As of this date, 757,650 individuals have been cancelled by Coronavirus. In my hometown, 275 people — mostly old folk — have perished.

We live at a time when the global ecosystem is collapsing under the onslaught of capitalist industrialism. Authoritarian regimes and movements are flourishing. To put it another way, the species is not ‘a culture in transition’ but a civilisation in collapse. If — in the face of all the available evidence — we are in fact heading toward a more equal (global) society, it will not simply be because of commitment to ‘values’, but to their realisation through struggle, and as another writer put it:

Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.

Love and rage,

Andy

See also : August 12, 2020 : Nick Cave labels ‘cancel culture’ as “mercy’s antithesis”, Will Richards, NME | Nick Cave Says Cancel Culture ‘Hampers the Creative Spirit of a Society’, Emily Tan, Spin | Nick Cave Addresses “Cancel Culture”, Tom Breihan, Stereogum | August 13, 2020 : Nick Cave slams cancel culture as ‘bad religion run amuck’, Martin Boulton, The Age | Nick Cave compares cancel culture to ‘bad religion’, BBC | Nick Cave: ‘cancel culture is bad religion run amuck’, Lanre Bakare, The Guardian | The monarch of middlebrow, Anwen Crawford, Overland, No.197, Summer 2009.

Posted in Art, Broken Windows, Death, Media, Music, Poetry, State / Politics, That's Capitalism! | Tagged , , , , , , , | 5 Comments

Tucker Carlson is Antifa

Posted on August 14, 2020 by @ndy

From The Department of Too-Good-Not-To-Share (via JustinTBrown) …

Posted in !nataS, Anti-fascism, Art, Broken Windows, Film, Media, Poetry, State / Politics, Television, That's Capitalism!, War on Terror | Tagged , | Leave a comment

The Base: Exporting Accelerationist Terror [via The Lads Society]

Posted on August 13, 2020 by @ndy

A problem for the Australian antifa, and indeed for anti-fascist groups in Europe and the US, is that few people and organisations they oppose here have much to do with Nazism. ~ Chip Le Grand, Antifa Australia goes for the jugular, The Australian, December 9, 2017

Huh.

The Southern Poverty Law Centre has just published an exposé on neo-Nazi terror group The Base and its links to Australian neo-Nazis, specifically ‘The Lads Society’:

The materials show that the group made significant inroads into parts of Australia’s far right, and in particular the Lads Society, a white nationalist group that once invited Brenton Tarrant, the Australian who murdered 51 Muslims in Christchurch, New Zealand, on March 15, 2019, to be a member.

A few notes:

• ‘The Lads Society’ was born out of defunct fascist groupsucule the ‘United Patriots Front’, an ultimately unstable coalition of neo-Nazis and Christian fun-da-mentalists. The UPF was a Facebook creation, which terminated after the corporation closed its Facebook page in mid-2017. I wrote extensively on the subject of the UPF, including in The Guardian in November 2015 (The UPF and Reclaim Australia aren’t ‘concerned parents’ or a bad joke: ‘Don’t get sucked in by the hijinks of far-right activists: active neo-Nazis are welcome and hold leadership positions in a movement gaining in appeal’). In its infinite wisdom, a few weeks ago Facebook terminated my page on the basis of my alleged ‘support’ for figures associated with the UPF(!).

• Other local members of the far-right to have championed RaHoWa!, GTKRWN, #SiegeCulture and so on have included writers for David Hiscox’s blog XYZ. Doing so was considered kosher by Facebook, and the XYZ page was only terminated after the XYZ boys published a ‘satirical’ article about Waleed Aly of Channel 10’s ‘The Project’.

• The SPLC notes that:

The false belief that a conspiracy exists to carry out “white genocide,” or to effect a “great replacement” of white Americans through mass immigration, is widely prevalent across the racist far right, from outright neo-Nazis, to so-called “identitarian” groups, to influential Republican officials. Many white nationalists hold, again falsely, that this “genocide” or “replacement” has been orchestrated by Jews.

‘The Great Replacement’ is what the Christchurch mass-murderer titled his manifesto and was also a theory propounded by Stefan Molyneux and Lauren Southern, who ‘Christian conservative’ Dave Pellowe brought to Australia for a speaking tour in 2018. Their tour was widely celebrated on various Murdoch media properties and, after a brief ‘retirement’, a little more than a year after the Christchurch massacre Southern has returned to Australia and been warmly embraced by the same parties. Indeed, Southern will be joining a glittering array of stars — including former Labor leader turned NSW PHONy Senator Mark Latham — at the ‘Conservative Political Action Conference’ in Sydney in November.

What’s a few dead Muslims between frens eh?

Posted in Anti-fascism, Broken Windows, Death, History, Media, State / Politics, That's Capitalism!, War on Terror | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Yeah Nah Pasaran! #031 w Shalini Kantayya on Coded Bias : August 13, 2020

Posted on August 11, 2020 by @ndy

On this week’s episode of Yeah Nah, we talk to Shalini Kantayya [Twitter], the director of Coded Bias, a terrific documentary currently screening at MIFF 68 1/2.

CODED BIAS explores the fallout of MIT Media Lab researcher Joy Buolamwini’s startling discovery that facial recognition does not see dark-skinned faces accurately, and her journey to push for the first-ever legislation in the U.S. to govern against bias in the algorithms that impact us all.

Modern society sits at the intersection of two crucial questions: What does it mean when artificial intelligence increasingly governs our liberties? And what are the consequences for the people AI is biased against? When MIT Media Lab researcher Joy Buolamwini discovers that most facial-recognition software does not accurately identify darker-skinned faces and the faces of women, she delves into an investigation of widespread bias in algorithms. As it turns out, artificial intelligence is not neutral, and women are leading the charge to ensure our civil rights are protected.

Shalini is a filmmaker and activist whose previous work includes A Drop of Life and Catching the Sun.

See/hear also :

• SXSW Review: Coded Bias is an Alarming Look at How False Algorithms are Impeding Civil Rights, John Fink, The Film Stage, March 15, 2020 | ‘Coded Bias’: Film Review, Valerie Complex, Variety, February 12, 2020

• Joy Buolamwini /// Algorithmic Justice League | Cathy O’Neill /// Weapons of Math Destruction | Big Brother Watch (UK) | Future Histories: What Ada Lovelace, Tom Paine, and the Paris Commune Teach Us about Digital Technology, Lizzie O’Shea, Verso, 2019 | Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism, Safiya Umoja Noble, NYU Press, 2018

• Documents reveal AFP’s use of controversial facial recognition technology Clearview AI, Ariel Bogle, ABC, July 13, 2020 | Robodebt was an algorithmic weapon of calculated political cruelty, Asher Wolf, The Canberra Times, June 1, 2020 | #NotMyDebt : ‘a website built and run by a handful of volunteers from all around Australia, some with debts and some without, united by our deep concern about the injustice of Centrelink’s robo-debt fiasco and the impact it’s having on the lives of ordinary citizens’ /// Robodebt FAQs (Gordon Legal)

4.30pm, Thursday, August 13, 2020 /// 3CR /// 855AM / streaming live on the 3CR website

• We also have a Facebook page for the show, which you’re invited to ‘Like’ and to ‘Follow’.
• I have a Patreon account which youse are also invited to support.

Posted in Art, Broken Windows, Film, Media, Sex & Sexuality, State / Politics, That's Capitalism! | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Yeah Nah Pasaran! #030 w Alex DiBranco on Male Supremacism, Terror & The Right : August 6, 2020

Posted on August 4, 2020 by @ndy

On this week’s episode of Yeah Nah, we talk to Alex DiBranco [Twitter], the founder and executive director of the Institute for Research on Male Supremacism, which provides in-depth research and timely analysis of misogynist mobilization, ideology, and violence to support media, activists, and other researchers. Alex has written a number of articles for Political Research Associates (most recently on the subject of The First Anti-Feminist Massacre: A Reckoning with Misogynist Terrorism on the 30th Anniversary of the Montreal Mass Shooting), was interviewed by The Humanist in October last year and last month for NBC on the subject of Roy Den Hollander, ‘the men’s rights lawyer suspected of killing the son of a federal judge and wounding her husband … a self-described “anti-feminist” who wrote thousands of online posts and self-published a 1,700-word book describing his unabashed hatred of women’. See also : Inside the Violent and Misogynistic World of Roy Den Hollander, Nicole Hong, Mihir Zaveri and William K. Rashbaum, The New York Times, July 26, 2020.

See also : “Old Man Yells at Facebook” (July 31, 2020) | Here’s How Muslim Women In Australia Have Been Targeted By The Far Right (‘It’s not only sexism and it’s not only racism, and it’s not only Islamophobia, but it’s an amplification of all those phenomena’), Gina Rushton and Mark Di Stefano, Buzzfeed, March 26, 2019 | Quotations From Chairman Blair Cottrell (July 27, 2015).

4.30pm, Thursday, August 6, 2020 /// 3CR /// 855AM / streaming live on the 3CR website

• We also have a Facebook page for the show, which you’re invited to ‘Like’ and to ‘Follow’.
• I have a Patreon account which youse are also invited to support.

Bonus! Yeminem

Avi Yemini’s ex-wife reveals personal toll of his assault and harassment
Jon Andrews
Moorabbin Glen Eira Leader
July 30, 2019

The former wife of far-right activist Avi Yemini has broken down in court as she read out her victim impact statement after he was sentenced on unlawful assault and harassment charges.

His former wife wept as she described how Yemini, real first name Avraham, had “broken her spirit”, and “destroyed her self-worth” with his “torment”.

She said she “lived in a state of uncertainty”, felt anxious all the time and had panic attacks, and had to regularly see a counsellor.

Yemini showed no emotion as he was convicted and fined on charges of unlawful assault, using a carriage service to harass on three occasions and breaching a personal safety order at Moorabbin Magistrates’ Court this morning.

The 33-year-old from Berwick had earlier pleaded guilty to throwing a chopping board that hit his victim on her head while she prepared dinner in their Caulfield North home, and texting her vile and explicit messages.

The chopping board incident, which left her with a lump on her forehead, happened in March 2016, while the three harassing messages, which included calling her a “P.O.S” and a “c***”, occurred between July 2017 and November 2018.

The breach order relates to another person and not his former wife after Yemini failed to take down an online video as ordered by the court.

Yemini’s former wife said she had tried to leave him eight times but couldn’t go through with it.

“It was like I didn’t exist as a human being, I was just a vessel for his hatred”, she said.

“He terrorised me. I can’t imagine how it will be possible for me to have a relationship in the future.”

She said he also blamed her for the assault.

“What I will never forget is that he didn’t flinch when it happened”, she said.

“He didn’t ask if I was okay. he just walked by; I was left to tend to my own injuries and finish making the dinner.”

The former Israel Defence Force soldier has a large Facebook following under his page Avi Yemini Unbanned and has tens of thousands of fans on Twitter.

Yemini’s defence lawyer Deborah Mandie said he had already been “destroyed” in the media even though he was a “cleanskin” with no priors.

“The digital material has been absolutely brutal about my client”, Ms Mandie said.

“It’s become almost a meme, humiliating my client over and over. This is part of the punishment he is wearing for the matter.”

At a previous hearing Ms Mandie said Yemini didn’t intend to hit his wife with the chopping board, and it was an isolated incident across 10 years of a volatile relationship.

Magistrate Charles Tan said Yemini may have “paid a price” through the publicity surrounding the case, but he was there to sentence on the charges, not the community reaction.

He said Yemini’s former wife’s own words showed she felt distressed, humiliated and terrified by Yemini’s actions, and they could “not be described as of a trivial nature”.

“It was offending against a female in her own home, involving her suffering an injury”, Mr Tan said.

He thanked her for her bravery in reading our her statement, which she said she wanted to be made public.

Yemini was convicted and fined a total of $3600.

Posted in Anti-fascism, Death, History, Media, Sex & Sexuality, State / Politics, That's Capitalism!, War on Terror | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“Old Man Yells at Facebook”

Posted on July 31, 2020 by @ndy

I’ve unpublished my Facebook page for the time being. This follows my having published a post containing words and/or images the corporation has designated as expressing support for ‘dangerous individuals or organisations’; the ‘dangerous individual’ in this case possibly being convicted racist Neil Erikson. Or, possibly (but likely not), an image containing Erikson and several others (including Andrew Nolch) making the ‘OK’ gesture. Thus:





For those of you coming in late … I published these images in response to a Supreme Court decision yesterday ([2020] VSCA 195) dismissing an appeal by Andrew Nolch against a sentence imposed upon him for vandalising the memorial to Eurydice Dixon. The vandalism was celebrated by some of Nolch’s frens, including Erikson, who in November 2018 accompanied Nolch to court to support his appeal against his original conviction and sentencing (and also claimed to be providing Nolch with legal advice). As yesterday’s judgement puts it: For reasons that are by no means apparent, the applicant appealed the sentence imposed by the magistrate to the County Court. As suggested by the Court in argument, this was an act of sheer stupidity on his part.

The stoopid is, of course, relentless: Nolch is now in prison to serve a five months sentence while Erikson — having previously been convicted of, inter alia, stalking a rabbi and racial vilification — heads back to court later this year to face charges of having disrupted (along with YouTube sensation Claudia Benitez AKA ‘Dia Beltran’) a Christian religious meeting in Hawthorn and a Muslim prayer service in Federation Square. (A warrant for his arrest has been issued in NSW for having also allegedly disrupted a Christian prayer service in Gosford.)

Back to the judgement:

The crime of damaging property can be committed for a variety of reasons, including revenge or unthinking vandalism. In the present case, it is clear that the applicant’s was a calculated and deliberate act designed to cause great offence, annoyance and hurt to the community at large. So much increases the objective gravity of his offending. Thus, in his record on interview, when asked his ‘motivation’, he said:

I wanted to see if it could make the news. I wanted to –I –I basically wanted to see a giant dick –them report a giant dick on –in a news report, pretty much, I just thought it would be funny to be like, ‘Memorial vandalised with giant dick’, and then, like, just to see the dick on the screen, I just thought that’d be funny. I sort of wanted to see if I could do it, like, if I could, like, break the law. … And I kinda wanted to annoy feminists, like, I wanted –like, I –I have nothing against the –the person who passed away and their family, like, I don’t even know ‘em, so it’s, like, if they got offended and stuff it’s, like –I -look, I –I didn’t wanna offend them, like, I –I just –like, I just thought that would have to come with doing the graffiti, you know what I mean…. And so –so, yeah, I just wanted feminists to be like, ‘Oh, some guy drew a big dick, oh, what the hell?’ just –like, it was just, like, a –a troll sort of thing and —…To annoy them. But it is kinda weird ‘cause, like, I don’t really like feminists and stuff and I thought this before I did it, I was 1ike, ‘Well, this is gunna annoy them and make them even more think that the crime was a man hating thing’, and I was kinda like, ‘What am I even doing this?’ you know what I mean, but something just made me wanna do it and see if I can do it and –yeah.

In our view, apart from the plea of guilty and its purely utilitarian benefit, save for his lack of prior convictions there was little to mitigate the applicant’s original offending, which, given his motives, was an objectively serious example of the offence of damaging property.

Speaking of male supremacy, an upcoming episode of Yeah Nah Pasaran! features an interview with Alex DiBranco, the executive director of The Institute for Research on Male Supremacism.

Posted in !nataS, Anti-fascism, Art, Broken Windows, Death, History, Media, Sex & Sexuality, State / Politics, That's Capitalism!, War on Terror | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Yeah Nah Pasaran! #029 w Kaz Ross on China, Falun Gong & SovCits : July 30, 2020

Posted on July 29, 2020 by @ndy

On this week’s episode of Yeah Nah, we talk to (Dr) Kaz Ross [Twitter] about China, the CCP, Falun Gong, the extreme-right, sovereign citizens and more. Kaz is a Lecturer and the Coordinator in Asian Studies, in Global Cultures & Languages, in the School of Humanities at the University of Tasmania, and has recently had published ‘Living people’: who are the sovereign citizens, or SovCits, and why do they believe they have immunity from the law? (The Conversation, July 28, 2020) and has previously written CPAC: Conservative lightning rod, or ‘alt-right white extremism’? (The Big Smoke, August 9, 2019) and was interviewed on ‘Mornings with Leon Compton’ on ABC Hobart about the attempted fashy infiltration of the NSW Young Nationals on November 1, 2018.

See also : 闯 Chuang — a journal and blog analyzing the ongoing development of capitalism in China and the revolts of those crushed beneath it | 7+ Times Avi Yemini consorted with Neo-Nazis, AJDS, June 11, 2018 | Queensland student Drew Pavlou’s suspension reduced but will remain out of university until 2021, The Guardian (AAP), July 13, 2020 | The (Australian) Anarchists on Chinese Labor (1887) (August 17, 2014).

*Please note there’s an extended conversation with Kaz on the podcats version of the episode.

4.30pm, Thursday, July 30, 2020 /// 3CR /// 855AM / streaming live on the 3CR website

• We also have a Facebook page for the show, which you’re invited to ‘Like’ and to ‘Follow’.
• I have a Patreon account which youse are also invited to support.

Posted in History, Media, State / Politics, Student movement, That's Capitalism!, War on Terror | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Yeah Nah Pasaran! #028 w Elise Thomas on QAnon, conspiracies & teh intarwebs : July 23, 2020

Posted on July 21, 2020 by @ndy

On this week’s episode of Yeah Nah, we talk to Elise Thomas [Twitter] about QAnon, conspiracies and teh intarwebs. Elise is a freelance journalist, researcher at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s International Cyber Policy Centre and an analyst at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. Some of Elise’s recent publications include: Coronavirus denial spreading on social media, The Strategist, April 15, 2020 | Far-right groups and conspiracy theories are being brought together through the internet, ABC, February 27, 2020 | Qanon Deploys ‘Information Warfare’ to Influence the 2020 Election, Wired, February 17, 2020.

See/hear also : Yeah Nah Pasaran! #020 w Tom Tanuki on conspiracies, lockdowns, protests & Coronavirus : May 28, 2020 /// ‘BurnedSpy34’ (AKA Tim Stewart) is one of Scott Morrison’s #BFFs and a leading QAnon promoter: Revealed: the QAnon conspiracy theorist who is friends with Australian PM Scott Morrison, Christopher Knaus and Josh Taylor, The Guardian, October 5, 2019.

4.30pm, Thursday, July 23, 2020 /// 3CR /// 855AM / streaming live on the 3CR website

• We also have a Facebook page for the show, which you’re invited to ‘Like’ and to ‘Follow’.
• I have a Patreon account which youse are also invited to support.

Posted in Anti-fascism, Media, State / Politics | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

July 25 – The International Day of Solidarity with Antifascist Prisoners (#j25antifa)

Posted on July 15, 2020 by @ndy

Hey just a brief note to remind youse that July 25 is The International Day of Solidarity with Antifascist Prisoners. For more information, please see the blog.

See also : A few notes on #J25Antifa … (July 25, 2017).

Posted in Anti-fascism, State / Politics, That's Capitalism! | Tagged , , | 2 Comments