Just announced! My new standup show about chronic illness and wellness culture is called “Have You Tried Brain Surgery??” - and I’m bringing it to Adelaide Fringe.

Tickets are on sale now. Might make a good chrissie pressie for someone in your life?

(Yes, that’s me in the pic.)

https://adelaidefringe.com.au/fringetix/have-you-tried-brain-surgery-af2023

#adlfringe2023 #gluttonyfringe #brainsurgery #comedy

Timnit Gebru (@timnitGebru) adds another nail in the coffin of effective altruism (EA) with her piece for WIRED: https://www.wired.com/story/effective-altruism-artificial-intelligence-sam-bankman-fried/

For me, this follows »The good delusion: has effective altruism broken bad?« by Linda Kinstler: https://www.economist.com/1843/2022/11/15/the-good-delusion-has-effective-altruism-broken-bad

And »Against longtermism« by Émile P Torres: https://aeon.co/essays/why-longtermism-is-the-worlds-most-dangerous-secular-credo

@thepoliticalcat - so I'm not going to get into a long argument about this with you. I'm not interested in 'what-about-ism' and sea-lioning. If you want to read more about abolition, feel free to google and I'll post links here - people more brilliant and eloquent than I have written reams of insightful takes about how all this might work.

But I will say this:

One of the steps in abolition is deconstructing culture and building a society in which rape and murder is by far the outlier and not the norm.
When we have a society in which people don't rape and murder, we won't need places to put rapists and murderers.

We (prison abolitionists) are committed to the long haul. We are about changing society so that the most vulnerable are protected. We're not about only tearing down prisons, were also about building up a world in which they're not needed.

People have this strange need to punish.. as though it makes them better people because they've never been in prison.

I want to live in a world where we address the actual problems BEFORE the murders etc happen, instead of waiting until afterwards to just mop up the mess.

I want to live in a world where people's bodies are respected and never violated? And that means no murder, no rape, AND no locking people in cages.

Now, for the links...

@VoxofGod I think religion more broadly is defined by its relationship with power structures.

My grandfather was involved in the civil rights movement in Northern Ireland and his Catholic faith was a major contributing factor to his participation in that movement.

I think it's a mistake to describe the church as a monolith. It's an institution with competing traditions many of which are diametrically opposed and are in direct conflict with each other for control over the institution.

The reason I'm talking about Catholicism specifically, is that in the Australian context we have two strains of fascism that developed in parallel due to sectarian divides in Australia's society at the time.

I'm most familiar with the Catholic branch of fascism because I worked in the retail sector and the largest retail union is controlled by these people.

The other branch of fascism in Australia is a Protestant one which has historically been associated with groups like the New Guard in NSW and the White Army in Victoria. It also has had a significant impact on our politics, notably our second longest serving prime Minister John Howard allegedly grew up in a New Guard household.

It explicitly draws more from Nazism than Italian or Iberian fascism and has typically been associated with free market ideology (although occasionally it dipped into the corporatism that defines its Catholic counterparts). It's also been hostile to immigration to the Mediterranean and has typically been explicitly anti Catholic.

Until relatively recently they've been pretty hostile to one another. The man who has defined Catholic fascism in Australia, BA Santamaria openly disliked Nazism while embracing Franco and Salazar. He was also critical of his proteges (Former PM Tony Abbott and Howards former Chief of Staff, Gerard Henderson) decision to join the Liberal party which had historically been dominated by protestants. He always assumed the protestants would eventually turn on them because of his experience during the highly polarised interwar period.