“…the importance of [the 1950 Book] Canto General is that it ‘shows us the history of the Americas … [from] the point of view of the people themselves, not the history told by the conquerors.'” Source: “What We Can Learn from Neruda’s Poetry of Resistance”, Mark Eisner, Paris Review 26 March 2018
First, we are told poetry is NOT a medium for resolution.
Poetry can communicate confusion and suffering because it isn’t a medium for resolving problems.
Second, we are told it IS for generating real change.
Words have influence, and poetry’s words, dense with meaning and softened by emotion, can generate real change.
Certainly, a shift towards genuine resolution might be a meaningful change. Otherwise, what kind of change is being sought in relation to a path leading away from resolution? That sounds very bad. Or is there a third dimension, a change that doesn’t mean… moving towards or away?
Tuffaha’s poem is told from the perspective of a parent preparing to flee her house after receiving a warning call.
A parent gets a warning call.
There seems to be an inherent recognition of value, acknowledgement of agency, in the act of being warned of danger. Who was warned and why? Who wasn’t warned, and why not?
I find an important point about being warned casually glossed over in this essay, even as it says emotive response comes from varied expressions of loss.
Loss is definitely pain. Being warned of loss, when seen through a risk management lens, is a different kind of pain. Loss without warning and decision time doesn’t read like this.
It doesn’t matter
that 58 seconds isn’t long enough
to find your wedding album
or your son’s favorite blanket
or your daughter’s almost completed college application
or your shoes
or to gather everyone in the house.
It doesn’t matter what you had planned.
It doesn’t matter who you are.
Prove you’re human.
Prove you stand on two legs.
Run.
The NYT took a different approach from feelings evoked by “doesn’t matter what you had planned” poetry, when they wrote a dry perspective called “What should my ‘go bag’ contain?”
Perhaps most telling is the author suggests everyone read Palestinian poetry to relate to their human condition, instead of suggesting we read any poetry that expresses human pain of loss and suffering for us to understand the Palestinian condition.
Everyone Should Be Reading Palestinian Poetry: Poetry at its best can stun readers into silence, but also give the silenced a voice.
I agree we must honor Palestinian words and voices, but the author seems to mean we should do so exclusively. Why not bring in Israeli, Syrian, Sudanese or Ukranian voices, just for some obvious counter examples of what everyone needs to undo a silence?
Sudan has what voice at all, if we look at the coverage and access?
Is the point of claimed change possible from reading Palestinian poetry to see just one inhumanity, a unique spot in a particular place and time, or is it to be able recognize and relate to inhumanity at all and anywhere?
It seems a connection from the former to the latter is very weak if not completely absent from the article and its analysis. I’m left wondering why we are not encouraged more to apply the human voice towards humanity, which perhaps means less explaining and more to offer in terms of lasting change. It could be here less a question of whose voice rises holier in opposition, when instead there would be the wider appeal for us to define and demand kindness.
In case you ever had doubts about a TV show that featured a car decorated with inflammatory domestic terrorism propaganda (celebrating the blood-thirsty treasonous “monster” General Lee and the Confederate battle flag)… here is the guy on December 20 who became famous only by being paid to promote that car:
Source: Twitter
Lynching. Plain to see.
Here’s how Lincoln described such sentiments back in 1838.
Thus went on this process of hanging, from gamblers to negroes, from negroes to white citizens, and from these to strangers; till, dead men were seen literally dangling from the boughs of trees upon every road side; and in numbers almost sufficient, to rival the native Spanish moss of the country, as a drapery of the forest.
Lynching sentiments defined much of the pre and post-Civil War periods, where horrible people sounding like this Schneider guy went about demanding hangings as a means for censoring and murdering huge numbers of Americans they disagreed with.
“[The organized terror movement after Civil War] stock-in-trade was violence – intimidation and violence. People were beaten, people were flogged, people were lynched, people were shot. People’s homes were raided, they were dragged outdoors and flogged in the streets.”
And, he says, the violence often included “truly horrifying sadism”.
“It liberated the absolute worst impulses among” its members, Bordewich says, adding: “You can see this in today’s terrorist movements in other parts of the world – al-Qaida, IS. These are the organizations the Klan should be compared to. We think of terrorism today as something happening in other countries. It happened here in the 1870s.”
Intimidation and violence. They hung John Brown, they cancelled and assassinated Elijah Lovejoy, and then they lost a Civil War, before going right back to more lynchings.
That’s the real thread, that is the problem the tweet represents, as if some in America (e.g. Speaker of the House) still haven’t given up affinity for the centuries long nativist “America First” Klan threat to democracy expressed as… lynchings.
Source: Encyclopedia of Alabama, 1 Sept 1868 Tuscaloosa Independent Monitor. The KKK threatened that March 4, 1869 — first day of rule by avowed racist Horatio Seymour — would bring lynchings of white Americans (“scalawags” and “carpetbaggers”). Instead the Presidency was won in a landslide by Civil War hero and civil rights pioneer Ulysses S. Grant)
Let’s go back and ask again why did a TV show in America decide to center itself around a “monster” like General Lee and blast his treasonous, toxic Confederate hate symbol into everyone’s eyeballs as massive scale?
Ask also what kind of actor signs up to animate a mechanized General Lee as if it doesn’t mean exactly what everyone must recognize as divisive and cruel, including General Lee himself (given he asked that nobody use his name or image like this)?
It was propaganda of the worst kind. A racist mysoginyst “rebellion” designed as subtle saccharin to undermine democracy, while repudiating their own acts as both innocent and above the law.
According to the researchers, this experiment demonstrated that just seeing the Confederate flag, even subliminally, made White participants less likely to vote for a Black person. […] In their report, published in the journal Political Psychology, the research team concluded that just being exposed to the Confederate flag triggers racially biased attitudes, even among Whites who are not consciously prejudiced. Clearly, even if the Confederate flag is a symbol of pride for those who honor it, it also carries a message of racial bias that can affect people at an unconscious level.
Defenders of the show will trot out people who say they loved watching it, enjoyed seeing a fun and helpful side to some racist whites, as if to boast how successfully fascist propaganda on widespread TV could run without detection. It’s like saying “did you see the show where the Nazi in uniform held the door open for someone, cracked jokes and rescued a kitten from a tree?”
This stuff shouldn’t be hard to dismiss as fluff obscuring reality, as a new Holocaust film “The Zone of Interest” explores.
The movie you see observes the mundane day-to-day lives of a well-off German family. Over and over, the father, Rudolf (played by Christian Friedel), goes to and from work; the mother, Hedwig (Anatomy of a Fall’s Sandra Hüller), tends to her garden; and their children, a rambunctious bunch, play with their toys. In the movie you hear, however, there’s intermittent gunfire, bursts of screams, and an ever-present industrial cacophony. Along with snatches of dialogue and glimpses of details—the costuming, the barbed wire, the smoke—the film makes clear what’s going on: Rudolf is Rudolf Höss, the real-life longest-serving commandant of Auschwitz, and this is a portrait of how he and his Nazi family actually lived, going about their days adjacent to the death camp he ran.
“Seriously, folks?,” Schneider said in a statement to Deadline. “I said no such thing. Despite headlines claiming otherwise, I absolutely did not call for an act of violence or threaten a U.S. president.”
Absolutely did not? That seems very confident for something that is so easily proven to be the opposite.
This gaslighting attempt is so sloppy it seems based in delusion. Perhaps it stems from decades of being drunk with privilege and power, profiting heavily from the glorification and promotion of General Lee’s domestic terrorism for so long, enjoying zero accountability.
General Lee was quite clearly a weak leader, and even more a treasonous monster of the worst cruelty, who led a Civil War to expand state-sanctioned rape of black women. His monuments have been proven to be directly correlated with lynchings, erected by racist mobs in the 1920s to threaten any American families and governments who dared to desire the protection of law and order.
His name is a threat, whether on street signs or schools; a precursor and warning to racist violence. Robert E. Lee, like an Osama bin Laden Avenue or Timothy McVeigh Park is the detestable name of terrorism.
Now the actor known best for gladly celebrating and spreading this evil monster’s racist hate, using a “fun loving” TV show for personal profit, has been caught on Twitter more clearly than ever doing what he always did.
Accountability finally?
Is it any wonder lynching was top of mind for the actor when he disagreed with anyone? Is him driving around waving a Confederate flag, which stands for lynching, really that different than him saying he stands for lynching? In this Twitter case he directed his words towards the President, but it’s not like the “Dukes of Hazard” hadn’t consciously preserved racist lynching sentiment the whole time on multiple communication channels from underwear to children toys.
This is the General Grant toy car, honoring the greatest military leader in American history who brilliantly and decisively ended slavery by winning the Civil War. The inverse toy car to this, a bright orange one under a Confederate flag named for the pro-slavery treasonous General Lee, was marketed using a “Dukes of Hazard” TV show to put a smile on doing harm to democracy (undermining Black Americans)… a domestic terror propaganda tactic that finally ended only in 2015, 150 years after the Civil War was won by Grant.
So many people have sent me this story from Forbes with a “OMG you’ve been validated” note that I have to repost it here just to acknowledge that I have seen it.
Tesla drivers are the most accident-prone, according to a LendingTree analysis of 30 car brands. It found that Tesla drivers are involved in more accidents than drivers of any other brand. Tesla drivers had 23.54 accidents per 1,000 drivers. Ram (22.76) and Subaru (20.90) were the only other brands with more than 20 accidents per 1,000 drivers for every brand.
The truth, as I’ve tried to post here for at least seven years, is finally seeing attention it deserves. In a nutshell, Tesla falsely claims a 40% reduction in crashes when their engineering actually increases crashes more than 10%, an incredibly dangerous 50 point spread!
The more Tesla the more tragic death. Without fraud there would be no Tesla. Source: Tesladeaths.com
Driving a Tesla is significantly less safe than other far better engineered brands, if not the most unsafe of them all.
A poem by me:
Electric cars were the future in 1981.
- Reagan shut it all down.
Electric cars were the future in 2001.
- Bush shut it all down.
Electric cars were the future in 2021.
- Tesla is a dumpster fire run by a killer clown.
The sad part is electric cars are far, far safer than combustion engines. There’s no question Reagan and Bush were horribly corrupt and counter-productive, delaying a safer future at the cost of untold lives from pollution and worse. How did America end up here? Why is it taking so long for the public to see the threat to society is NOT the electric vehicle, but one man behind a particular brand being horribly corrupt and counter-productive?
Consider how the Tesla CEO has been obsessed with aggressively censoring and falsely shaming all critics, spinning out egregious lies that put millions in harms way even as his toxic management culture has obviously led to the death of hundreds.
Wouter Basson, known as “Doctor Death”, led the Apartheid government clandestine chemical and biological warfare program to capture and assassinate people who had anti-apartheid thoughts: Project Coast. He did not apologize, did not show any remorse and after 13 years of fighting in court was found guilty of unethical conduct.
I’ve written extensively about such double-bind propaganda, that should be familiar to anyone who is aware of Elon Musk’s affinity for Nazism and Apartheid; “Autopilot” was loudly promoted on social media as passively preventing crashes even when actively disabled, despite evidence that neither having the software enabled nor disabled would prevent an alarming rise in fatal Tesla crashes because they are caused by overconfidence in Elon Musk.
It’s been a long road for those of us calling out the many, many gross and pernicious Tesla safety lies. With any luck we also might soon see some real bans on Tesla for its negligence and design failures, or even see the CEO go to jail.
“Over the course of many months, you used your considerable social media skills to tout your company in ways that were materially false,” said Judge Edgardo Ramos.
“What you said over and over on different media outlets was wrong,” the judge added.
No kidding, Judge Ramos is right. Look at the chart above of deaths from Tesla, then the quote from Elon Musk in 2021 telling the press that Autopilot is “not great”, and then this provably false advertisement.
Source: Twitter
Materially false. What Tesla said over and over was predatory, anti-competitive and wrong.
Tesla deaths compared to all other EVs shows the obvious problem. It’s about accountability for lies, all about the Tesla CEO who regularly lies. Source: Tesladeaths.com
Let’s give that poem another try:
In '81, dreams 'lektrified the air,
A promise of brilliance beyond compare.
Yet Reagan's hand, a chilling storm,
Snuffed out tales, left hearts forlorn.
In 2001, hopes danced anew,
Electric whispers kissed morning dew.
But Bush's reign, a sorrowful frown,
Quelled the dreams, brought them crashing down.
Enter 2021, a scene so bright,
Electric whispers in soft twilight.
Yet Elon Musk's tale, a murky shroud,
A strange reputation, a foreboding cloud.
A jester with a sinister grin,
In this electric quest, discord within.
Nature weeps, Tesla's spirit sighs,
Racist demagogue, cruelly destroying lives.
“GAS STATIONS SUCK: AMERICANS CRAVE RANGE TO AVOID THEM“.
It’s true. American car drivers travel less than 50 miles a whopping 98% of the time, yet that somehow is falsely interpreted by pundits as a worry about having long range.
The fixation on mileage may be misplaced, however, given Americans don’t actually tend to go all that far when they get behind the wheel. A 2022 study from the US Bureau of Transportation Statistics showed more than half of all daily trips – by any mode of transportation – were fewer than 3 miles (4.8km). In fact, only 2% were longer than 50 miles (80.4km).
Internet service providers ranked second-lowest on a list of 43 consumer industries, outperforming only gas stations.
The misery of pumping gas, due to private yet centrally planned and controlled fuel distribution spots, has created an expectation of “range” to stay away from dealing with the gas service providers more than any actual need for travel distance.
I’ll say it again, American “range” anxiety is entirely because gas stations suck. It has almost nothing to do with driving far, or even dreaming about some long range destination, it’s “how long before I’m back in gas station hell”.
Meanwhile, quality of life actually improves if the act of stopping at places people like to spend time also means their car is refueled, such as having nice lunch, visiting with others, taking a view or a nap. It’s like a horse being fed and watered when the rider dismounts at any destination. Natural, sensible.
The EV should have been able to target the gas station anxiety (capitalize on the inversion of models) to promote distributed, decentralized charging (refuel anywhere, anytime, from anything) as true freedom. Alas, Tesla stepped in and ruined the conversation with dumb “range” propaganda that falsely promoted itself instead.
The simple fact that Americans travel such short distances in their car ironically is the reason why grossly deceptiveTesla range fraud wasn’t exposed and discussed more widely early in its existence.
Tesla is facing a class-action lawsuit filed by customers who say they were misled by the company’s exaggerated range claims. The lawsuit was filed yesterday, days after a report revealed that Tesla exaggerated its electric vehicles’ range so much that many drivers thought their cars were broken.
Falsely advertising 300 mile range fantasies while delivering half that or less in reality, hasn’t hit Americans hard because so rarely did they actually drive far distances. They did complain however about their Tesla dashboard software, designed to lie, engineered for zero integrity.
Tesla employees had been instructed to thwart any customers complaining about poor driving range from bringing their vehicles in for service. Last summer, the company quietly created a “Diversion Team” in Las Vegas to cancel as many range-related appointments as possible.
The disaster was self-inflicted, as a Lance Armstrong level of carefully created evil, where fake victories were celebrated as a “net” improvement. Elon Musk arrogantly gambled that nobody ever would hold Tesla accountable for cheating.
The directive to present the optimistic range estimates came from Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk, this person said. “Elon wanted to show good range numbers when fully charged,” the person said, adding: “When you buy a car off the lot seeing 350-mile, 400-mile range, it makes you feel good.” […] Driving range is among the most important factors in consumer decisions on which electric car to buy, or whether to buy one at all. So-called range anxiety – the fear of running out of power before reaching a charger – has been a primary obstacle to boosting electric-vehicle sales.
There you have it. Elon Musk inflamed unfounded anxiety and false fears in order to aggressively proclaim he was the only one who could save people from short range when that was NOT the actual anxiety.
This bait and switch certainly impacted better engineered cars like the Nissan LEAF, which had been the best selling battery electric vehicle into 2019 with an honest range about the same as the actual Tesla range… again, about half of the fake range Elon Musk advertised.
It’s a notorious fascist strategy to artificially corner people using fear into becoming radical “believers”, a tactic very harmful to any market. Not only is Tesla undermining fair commerce with their overt swindles (stealing real business to replace it with fraud), more generally they completely disrespect law and order with highly planned deception.
The founder of an electric truck start-up that was popular in the US has been sentenced to four years in prison.
Trevor Milton, who led Nikola Corporation, was convicted of fraud last year after a jury found he had lied persistently about the company.
[…]
“Over the course of many months, you used your considerable social media skills to tout your company in ways that were materially false,” said Judge Edgardo Ramos.
“What you said over and over on different media outlets was wrong,” the judge added.
It is hard to believe Elon Musk wasn’t thrown in jail for the exact same fraud by 2019. Hundreds of people are dead unnecessarily, the blood on his hands far worse than any other car company. Why are the egregious crimes of Musk so slow to be prosecuted, leaving so many dead, yet his philosophical peers like Milton, Holmes, and Bankman-Fried already are being locked up?
a blog about the poetry of information security, since 1995
