So XR Scotland just did a surprisingly awesome thing, publishing the statement On Class and Climate Struggle: Decolonising XR. I’m gonna copy paste the whole thing because it is so good that this is happening and to be honest, I would not be at all surprised if someone else at XR tried to make it disappear.
Oct 19th 2019
In the last week, two widely-shared images have summed up deep-rooted
problems at the heart of the Extinction Rebellion movement. One, a
white man wearing a suit jacket being pulled off the top of a Tube train
by people needing to get to work. In Canning Town, a mostly working
class area of London that has been hit by years of austerity.
The other, a card and a bunch of flowers sent to police officers by
an XR arrestee, thanking them for their ‘professionalism’. Brixton
police station, where black men have died in custody.
These scenes have shown nothing new—XR has long been criticised for
failing to connect with marginalised communities. But they have shown
how urgently XR needs to openly address these issues.
A core message of XR has been ‘we are all in this together’. That
climate catastrophe is coming for everyone, whatever class, race or
creed, we can all be united by a common cause in the face of a shared
threat.
BUT: – People in the Global South are already experiencing floods,
drought, famine and unbearable heat that won’t affect the North in same
way. – They have been robbed of the resources to be resilient to climate change by the economic system that benefits the richest 1%. –
People living in poverty, in both the Global South and North, due to
structural injustice (often people of colour and disabled people) are
and will be adversely affected in ways the rich are protected from. –
Migration caused by impacts of climate and ecological emergency is met
by hostile border policies that leave people to drown and keeps them in
indefinite detention.
Yes, the crisis will come for everyone. But there are massively
unjust ways this is damaging some people more than others. And when we
erase that, when we ignore the voices of those on the frontlines and who
have the most at stake, when we focus only on ‘our children’ and not
the people who are dying now, we risk leaving space for eco-fascism. By
refusing to name the causes of both the climate crisis and other social
injustices–colonialism and capitalism—XR will continue to alienate the
people who are already living at the sharp end of the system that is
ultimately killing us all.
In the run-up to the October International Rebellion, members of XR
Scotland chose to highlight these issues, and to respond to the concerns
of women of colour in our group being dismissed by key figures in XR
UK, by creating banners reading ‘DECOLONISE XR’ and ‘CLIMATE STRUGGLE =
CLASS STRUGGLE’. Many people, and other groups in XR such as Extinction Rebellion Youth, Global Justice Rebellion and XR Internationalist Solidarity Network, applauded these banners. Others in XR UK questioned this ‘messaging’.
At last week’s roadblock action targeted at the Government Oil and
Gas conference, protestors from groups other than XR Scotland began
singing the chant ‘police, we love you, we’re doing this for your
children too’.
A woman who was with the XR protest started to shout: ‘Say that to
Stephen Lawrence and Mark Duggan’s family; say you love the police to
the people of Tottenham. Say that to my friends whose lives are ruined
by this system. Listen, if the people on that road were all people of
colour they would be getting charged at with riot gear. My black and
brown friends get stopped and searched EVERY DAY’. Other XR members told
her off for raising her voice and talking about something that was
‘unrelated’.
While some Scottish rebels went around asking people individually not
to sing that chant, another XRS rebel—a young woman of colour—took the
megaphone to ask ‘please don’t sing that—it’s really alienating to
people from marginalised communities’. A middle-aged white woman then
took the megaphone away from her, to say that she does love the police,
that she is doing this for their children, and her own children. A woman
of colour’s critique was very literally silenced by the concerns of the
white woman.
Narrating this incident is not to individually blame that white
woman—her actions were a symptom of something systemic in both XR and
wider society. But what it reminds the white, middle-class people that
dominate our movement is to stop taking the megaphone. To be quiet, and
listen.
After listening, what comes next is more difficult. How can XR use
its resources in genuine solidarity? How do we shift from being an
overwhelmingly white and middle-class movement to centring those who
have been excluded? And without tokenism, or requiring disabled, working
class and people of colour to do the work that those with more
privilege should have done long ago? But taking the time to listen,
absorb, and reflect, is the essential first step.
So the other night during D&D, I had the sudden thoughts that:
1) Binary files are 1s and 0s
2) Knitting has knit stitches and purl stitches
You could represent binary data in knitting, as a pattern of knits and purls…
You can knit Doom.
However, after crunching some more numbers:
The compressed Doom installer binary is 2.93 MB. Assuming you are using sock weight yarn, with 7 stitches per inch, results in knitted doom being…
3322 square feet
Factoring it out…302 people, each knitting a relatively reasonable 11 square feet, could knit Doom.
Hi fun fact!!
The idea of a “binary code” was originally developed in the textile industry in pretty much this exact form. Remember punch cards? Probably not! They were a precursor to the floppy disc, and were used to store information in the same sort of binary code that we still use:
Here’s Mary Jackson (c.late 1950s) at a computer. If you look closely in the yellow box, you’ll see a stack of blank punch cards that she will use to store her calculations.
This is what a card might look like once punched. Note that the written numbers on the card are for human reference, and not understood by the computer.
But what does it have to do with textiles? Almost exactly what OP suggested. Now even though machine knitting is old as balls, I feel that there are few people outside of the industry or craft communities who have ever seen a knitting machine.
Here’s a flatbed knitting machine (as opposed to a round or tube machine), which honestly looks pretty damn similar to the ones that were first invented in the sixteenth century, and here’s a nice little diagram explaining how it works:
But what if you don’t just want a plain stocking stitch sweater? What if you want a multi-color design, or lace, or the like? You can quite easily add in another color and integrate it into your design, but for, say, a consistent intarsia (two-color repeating pattern), human error is too likely. Plus, it takes too long for a knitter in an industrial setting. This is where the binary comes in!
Here’s an intarsia swatch I made in my knitwear class last year. As you can see, the front of the swatch is the inverse of the back. When knitting this, I put a punch card in the reader,
and as you can see, the holes (or 0′s) told the machine not to knit the ground color (1′s) and the machine was set up in such a way that the second color would come through when the first color was told not to knit.
tl;dr the textiles industry is more important than people give it credit for, and I would suggest using a machine if you were going to try to knit almost 3 megabytes of information.
It goes beyond this. Every computer out there has memory. The kind of memory you might call RAM. The earliest kind of memory was magnetic core memory. It looked like this:
Wires going through magnets. This is how all of the important early digital computers stored information temporarily. Each magnetic core could store a single bit - a 0 or a 1. Here’s a picture of a variation of this, called rope core memory, from one NASA’s Apollo guidance computers:
You may think this looks incredibly handmade, and that’s because it is. But these are also extreme close-ups. Here’s the scale of the individual cores:
The only people who had the skills necessary to thread all of these cores precisely enough were textile and garment workers. Little old ladies would literally thread the wires by hand.
And thanks to them, we were able to land on the moon. This is also why memory in early computers was so expensive. It had to be hand-crafted, and took a lot of time.
(little old ladies sewed the space suits, too)
Fun fact: one nickname for it was LOL Memory, for “little old lady memory.”
I mean let’s also touch on the Jacquard Loom, if you want to get all Textiles In Sciencey. It was officially created in 1801 or 1804 depending on who you ask (although you can see it in proto-form as early as 1725) and used a literal chain of punch cards to tell the loom which warps to raise on hooks before passing the weft through. It replaced the “weaver yelling at Draw Boy” technique, in which the weaver would call to the kid manning the heddles “raise these and these, lower these!” and hope that he got it right.
With a Jacquard loom instead of painstakingly picking up every little thread by hand to weave in a pattern, which is what folks used to do for brocades in Ye Olde Times, this basically automated that. Essentially all you have to do to weave here is advance the punch cards and throw the shuttle. SO EASY.
ALSO, it’s not just “little old ladies sewed the first spacesuits,” it’s “the women from the Playtex Corp were the only ones who could sew within the tolerances needed.” Yes, THAT Playtex Corp, the one who makes bras. Bra-makers sent us to the moon.
And the cool thing with them was that they did it all WITHOUT PINS, WITHOUT SEAM RIPPING and in ONE TRY. You couldn’t use pins or re-sew seams because the spacesuits had to be airtight, so any additional holes in them were NO GOOD. They were also sewing to some STUPID tight tolerances-in our costume shop if you’re within an eighth of an inch of being on the line, you’re usually good. The Playtex ladies were working on tolerances of 1/32nd of an inch. 1/32nd. AND IN 21 LAYERS OF FABRIC.
The women who made the spacesuits were BADASSES. (and yes, I’ve tried to get Space-X to hire me more than once. They don’t seem interested these days)
This is fascinating. I knew there was a correlation between binary and weaving but this just takes it to a whole nother level.
The current usage of “a few bad apples” bothers me.
A few bad apples spoil the barrel. If you put a rotting apple in with three dozen good ones, every adjacent apple will be rotting within days. “A few bad apples” does NOT mean “we have a good barrel but, oh well, sometimes bad things happen.” “A few bad apples” means “Our entire organism is rotting from the inside out, triggered by the actions of a few and perpetuated by the natural processing of the whole.” When you say “we had a few bad apples” your next words had BETTER be “we excised them, quickly and permanently, and checked the remaining ones to make sure they’re still good.”
This has been my rant, thank you.
The full phrase as I’ve always heard it is “don’t let a few bad apples spoil the whole barrel”, which I guess people sometimes wrongly interpret as “so enjoy all the good apples in there and don’t be so darn picky about the bad ones” and not, y’know, “get the bad ones the heck out of there before the rot spreads”.
From @riepoyonn: “Record of Amelie and Canele’s growth. When twins were 3months→5months→1yearold ✨” #catsofinstagram [source: https://ift.tt/2qi2C32 ]
Now remember, a lady rides sidesaddle, NOT astride. Your mother would be in hysterics at the very idea that a daughter of hers would ride a werewolf astride! Why, next you’ll be showing ankle…
I HAVE NOT SEEN THIS POST IN A YEAR.
LOL
I’m riding a werewolf astride and there’s nothing you can do to stop me!
I’ve never seen this before in my entire life and I feel like I’ve been left out on the good shit
Please read Gail Carriger’s Finishing School & Parasol Protectorate books. They’re steampunk supernatural romantic comedies. The Finishing School series is a prequel to the Paraole Protectorate books.
