and why we should all be concerned about prison time for peaceful protestors.
By Ceri jones
Fracking splits opinions, but even more so today. It’s true that, for the time being at least, we need hydrocarbons. Regardless of partial or ‘some day’ alternatives in the energy mix, right now we’re dependent on affordable sources of dirty energy.
But today marks the first time since 1932 that an environmental protester has been sentenced to jail .
Anti-fracking protestors held red roses in support of the men.
Fracking in the UK
Energy company Cuadrilla was granted a licence to drill for shale gas near Preston New Road in the north of England in October 2016. Operations kicked off to construct a fracking pad at the site near Blackpool in January 2017, then on 25 July a convoy of lorries moved in to deliver drilling equipment.
While many members of the local community were up in arms over the decision, four protestors took direct action by climbing on top of lorries – Simon Roscoe Blevins from Sheffield, Richard Roberts from London, Richard Loizou from Devon and Julian Brock from Torquay.
Unable to proceed, the lorries came to standstill and the men sat tight, supplied with food, drinks and blankets by other protestors. Of course, this couldn’t last forever and eventually Loizou descended, closely followed by Blevins and Roberts, and Brock the following day. All were arrested.
Sentencing protestors
Today in Preston Crown Court, Judge Robert Altham sentenced Blevins and Roberts to 16 months in prison, Loizou to 15 months in prison, and Brock to a 12-month suspended sentence, a hefty price for a combined 276 hours sitting atop lorries.
Altham said that, despite their serious concerns for the environment, the defendants saw the public as “necessary and justified collateral damage”. This collateral damage was reported by prosecutor Craig MacGregor as travel disruption, disruption to local residents and loss of trade for businesses over a period of less than four days. However, this translated to police costs and loss of money for Cuadrilla – the biggest factors – totalling £12,000 and £50,000 respectively.
Reminding the court of citizens’ rights to peaceful protests, and that no persons or equipment were damaged, Kirsty Brimelow QC, representing Roberts, pushed the men’s good intentions and said, ‘It is relevant that there is a huge amount of scientific study that points to the damage of increasing climate emissions,’ and she indicated intergovernmental climate panel findings that climate change would displace 75 million people by 2035 and lead to the extinction of one in four species by 2050.
Your opinion on fracking
Whatever your opinion on fracking, an open dialogue cannot be had unless all factors are taken into account, including our urgent and growing need for energy security and that studies have proven that fracking produces radioactive waste.
Added to this, local authority Lancashire County Council opposed the drilling and more than 300 protestors have been arrested since operations started. So it seems that those most likely to be affected by the fracking are the ones not being allowed to exercise their freedom of speech, or had their concerns fall on deaf ears.
Whereas, the government and Cuadrilla stand to earn a great deal of money in their determination to tap that gas.
Industry, economy, business - when is it ever simple? However, it’s essential to keep the conversation open to find a better way to power the country without compromising the people prepared to protect it.
For eveyone griping about looting, here are some alternative things to get mad about!
1.) if we are mad at looting then we should return every single artifact and curio in our museums that we have looted from other countries.
2.) Maybe we should start arresting and prosecuting the assholes who buy diapers and sanitizer in bulk to illegally resell at an insane cost while poor families who actually need those items can’t get any because of it.
3.) You should be mad at the double standard of how police treat different protests. Armed “protesters”were allowed to enter a government building WITH THEIR GUNS to politically intimidate, threaten & terrorize politicians who wanted to protect the community with the quarantine. Some even physical pushing police in riot gear but the police did not react and instead protected them. But protesters who seek justice and accountability for a black man brutally murdered by a police officer get beaten, shot at, pepper sprayed and tear gassed.
4.) the more radical protesters who have been causing property damage WHO DO NOT represent the majority of peaceful protestors are going to be grouped as a whole by the right wing to excuse the police brutality against the regular law abiding protestors and black people.
5.) And finally and most importantly, the four fired officers each have a prior history of police brutality that was swept under the rug and ignored STILL have not been charged with MURDERING the unarmed, handcuffed and helpless George Floyd. Everyone SHOULD be irate at THAT!
This weekend has been full of awesome conversations, connections, interactions, and people.
Relationship Anarchy Basics by Marie S. Crosswell A relationship anarchist believes that love is abundant and infinite, that all forms of love are equal, that relationships can and should develop organically with no adherence to rules or expectations from outside sources, that two people in any kind of emotionally salient relationship should have the freedom to do whatever they naturally desire both inside their relationship and outside of it with other people.
Relationship anarchy does share with polyamory an overall rejection of sexual and romantic monogamy, its common rejection of legal/institutional marriage, etc, but it also seeks to completely break down what I like to call the Romantic Sex-Based Relationship Hierarchy by erasing relationship categories determined by the presence or absence of sex and/or romance. Relationship anarchy consequently creates equality of all personal/intimate relationships, behaviorally and emotionally. The freedom to interact and value one’s relationships starting with a blank slate, distributing physical intimacy, sexual intimacy, emotional intimacy, etc. according to one’s desires rather than preexisting rules and categories of relationship types, is an expression of this equality.
Relationship anarchists do not rank personal, loving relationships. They do not see any set of behaviors as innately restricted to romantic and/or sexual relationships, which certainly makes it difficult to elevate romantic-sexual relationships to a superior position above nonsexual/nonromantic relationships. RA’s see all of their personal, loving relationships—meaning, any relationship that isn’t professional or casual in nature—as equally important, unique, fulfilling different needs or desires in their life, and as possessing similar or identical potential for emotional/physical/mental intimacy, love, and satisfaction. A relationship anarchist does not place an emotional ceiling on nonromantic/nonsexual friendship or on a sexual friendship that’s devoid of “romance.” A relationship anarchist does not limit physical/sensual affection in their nonsexual relationships just because they’re nonsexual or nonromantic. A relationship anarchist does not expect to spend most of their time with just one sexual partner/romantic partner or with their romantic/sexual partners in general, nor does an RA assume that the romantic/sexual relationships (if they have any) automatically deserve or get more time and prioritization than the nonsexual/nonromantic relationships.
I really like relationship anarchy because it recognizes the “Romantic Sex-Based Relationship Hierarchy”, or, how mainstream society promotes putting labels on relationships and ranking them according to if you’re getting some or not, or if you’re “serious” or not (which is often construed as romance). I don’t interpret relationship anarchy as having no hierarchies at all – some relationships will be prioritized because of time constraints, and there will always be differences in how much someone cares about different people – but it’s accepting that there is no value hierarchy in loving relationships (platonic, romantic, sexual, or otherwise).
I think that placing romantic, sexual relationships on a pedestal is dangerous. Esther Perel, in her talk Rethinking Infidelity, remarks, “We have a romantic ideal in which we turn to one person to fulfill an endless list of needs: to be my greatest lover, my best friend, the best parent, my trusted confidant, my emotional companion, my intellectual equal. And I am it: I’m chosen, I’m unique, I’m indispensable, I’m irreplaceable, I’m the one.” To depend on one individual so much, to be depended upon in the same way, to have your sense of self so intertwined – that’s terrifying to me.
I was talking with a friend about this and he noted that a lot of people desire comfort and stability, especially in relationships, and the standard monogamous relationship structure provides them that. It’s a way to make sure that the other person still loves you without having to check every time, and, in a sense, it avoids dealing with relationships as living things (that is, the supposedly terrifying notion that people and feelings change). Something we discussed is how odd it is that romantic relationships are defined by their end – a breakup or divorce automatically classifies the relationship as a failure. It goes back to viewing the end of a comfortable thing as an indication that it was never stable to begin with, along with the sunk cost fallacy. It doesn’t recognize the value of a relationship as the relationship itself.
There’s also a big difference between people who desire children and a family and people who don’t. I find that this correlates with the desire for comfort and stability (which makes sense in the context of raising a child), but also with the desire to be “normal” (or conform to societal norms because they don’t want to be “weird” or be viewed as an outsider).
Another note: RA is important to me as someone who’s asexual. Marie writes, “Relationship anarchy should be important to the asexual community because it is the only method of relationships that removes sex as an indicator of relationship value, of a partner’s value, and as the line of separation between important, serious bonds and less important, casual bonds.” There’s a documentary about asexuality, (A)sexual, that’s currently on Netflix. Part of it follows David Jay, the founder of AVEN (the Asexual Visibility and Education Network, which is the largest online asexual community), as he navigates through his relationships as an asexual person. What devastated me more than I expected was his conclusion when some of his close relationships ended because his partners directed more time toward their own sexual partners:
You know, when I think about intimacy, I still think mostly about communities, but I’ve also been shifting a lot and thinking more and more about intimacy with one person. So, that’s a transition from where I was a couple of years ago. And I think that the biggest thing that created that was what happened in my relationships. […] Feeling those relationships drift apart was really scary for me, and it sort of made me feel like maybe, even if I could make community relationships that were as close as I could possibly make them, they still wouldn’t be relationships that I could depend on in the way that I wanted to. They wouldn’t be relationships that I could raise a kid in. And that was really disheartening for me for a while. And thinking about that, I sort of…that made me more interested in a relationship with one person as a way to be kind of more stable. Even, like, that person could be a sexual person, and I could even be in a relationship that involved sex. I know that that’s something a lot of asexual people do, and that’s not something that I’m opposed to, but I know that I would need kind of that community-building or something else to really be the core source of intimacy in our relationship.
So, I want to clarify a little bit why sex is something that I’d want to have in a relationship with someone. The reason that sex is something that I’m now kind of willing to have in my relationships with people really gets to the fact that sex is how we take relationships seriously and that I feel like I’m gonna have a much easier time having a relationship that gets taken seriously and a relationship that works – envelops more options – if that’s something that I’m willing to put on the table.
I’ve spent so much time in this community fighting for the idea that people don’t need sex to be happy that it is really kind of disheartening for me to feel like I might need to have sex, just because that’s the only way to, like, access the kind of intimacy that I want to access. It feels like I’m not able to really form a connection on my own terms in the way that I would like to, and that’s fine. No one forms intimacy totally on their own terms. But that makes it…yeah, that was a little hard for me to get over.
What upset me the most was the admittance that most people believe that sex is key to intimacy, and in order for asexual people to enter into deeply intimate relationships, we may need to work within the romantic sex-based relationship hierarchical system. It may come down to compromises in the end, which are present in all types of relationships; it’s just that dealing with asexuality and aromanticism exposes the compromises that many allosexual/alloromantic people avoid or believe are “dealbreakers” in sexual/romantic relationships.
5 Ways Powerful People Trick You Into Hating Protesters by David Wong Let’s say that tomorrow you are elected Secret Ruler of the USA, a position that gives you total power over the government, economy, and the culture at large – everything that hippies refer to as “the system.” Now, your first job is to not get beheaded by rioting peasants, which means your first job is really to maintain “stability” (i.e., “keeping things mostly the way they are”).
Wait For One Of Them To Break The Law, Then Talk Only About That
“I mean, why can’t they protest within the law? You know, like Martin Luther King? That’s why he was universally respected in his day!”
Convince The Powerful Majority That They’re The Oppressed Ones
Three simple steps – exaggerate the victim’s power to get the public on your side, get the victim to lash out so you can claim victimhood yourself, insist all of their complaints are disingenuous.
Focus On Their Most Frivolous Complaints (And Most Unlikable Members)
[…] notice how we’re always making it personal – as demonstrated above, you don’t talk about global warming, you talk about Al Gore. You don’t talk about systemic racism, you talk about Al Sharpton’s unpaid taxes. Don’t talk about income inequality, talk about how Occupy Wall Street kids all have iPhones.
Pit Two Disadvantaged Groups Against One Another (And Insist That Only One Can “Win”)
If you can just convince them it’s a competition, they’ll spend all their energy hating each other and none of it trying to fix the system. The guy in the trailer park doesn’t blame the bankers for the economy, he blames minorities and immigrants. Only one of us can be the true victim here, dammit!
Insist That Any Change Will Ruin The World
Remember, humans are naturally risk-averse – people will stay in bad jobs and relationships and keep destructive habits, for fear that trying to fix the bad shit will result in losing everything. […] all you have to do is portray any criticism of the current system as an attack on everything we hold dear…
Overlooking the clickbait title and overly sarcastic tone, David thoughtfully lists out different techniques that the majority uses to control how the public views dissenting minority voices.
The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s water supply may be heavily compromised if the pipeline would ever leak.
As environmentalist Bill McKibben noted in the New Yorker, the pipeline was originally slated to cross the Missouri River not far from North Dakota’s capital city of Bismarck, but the route was changed partly due to concerns about the potential contamination of the capitol’s drinking water in the event of a leak or spill. The pipeline is now set to run half a mile from the Sioux reservation near its water supply, Lake Oahe. (x)
The construction of the pipeline is expected to disrupt the tribe’s sacred burial grounds and other historically significant sites.
In a broader perspective, the environment would suffer extreme consequences as it will fuel climate change.
Not only is it infringing on Native American rights but this pipeline will quicken the demise of Planet Earth. This is bigger than politics.
Sorry guys, not as much witchy related today, but civil rights related. All of the people talking in this post are from our community. If you know me, they really go hand in hand. Spread this post far and wide, and if you live in Minneapolis get pictures of what’s going on.
This is from a friend who lives in Minneapolis, to me, at 5am this morning in a discord server we’re part of. The first post is from a Minneapolis resident, the second is my reply and then another Minneapolis resident replying to me. The KKK is actively marching around Minneapolis wearing the whole get up and planting explosives and gasoline, and the news IS NOT COVERING THIS. WHY? I’ve made this post public, share it, screenshot it, spread the word since the news won’t cover it.
Please, when you go to protests wear a mask. We are not done with the pandemic. Also cover up any tattoos or other identifiable facial features, because it’s a pandemic. If you can, carry extra water (smartwater bottles filled with tap water are great) for flushing out people’s eyes because uhhhhh COVID. Stay safe!
Be sure to wear no identifiable clothing either! Viruses can find the logo on your shirt and track you down.
look into bloc tactics for concealment methods. have changes of clothes you can change rapidly, you need to be able to blend in with the crowd without looking how you looked before
~ A photograph of Charlotte Despard (1844-1939), speaking at an anti-fascist rally in Trafalgar Square, London, taken in June 1933 by James Jarché for the Daily Herald.
Despard was born in England, but later lived in Ireland, she was a suffragist, novelist and Sinn Féin activist.
