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Christopher Genovese's avatar

Fantastic and insightful piece, thank you. The connection you make with kettling protests is really apt. And the paragraph "Let’s imagine, just for a second, that you have institutional power....they can only make the cloud grow louder and, thus, less intelligible." just totally hits it.

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Bkhflx's avatar

This is insightful, thanks for writing about it. I think you could also use the term kettling to describe the redirecting of young people away from radicalism via the nonprofit industrial complex.

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Emma's avatar

Rebecca Traister pointed me to this article and I'm so glad I toggled over for the read!

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Grace Love's avatar

Thank you for this brilliance. Love bringing in Ms. Wynn and the fact that the endless critique and resentment is avoiding doing the Work of internal change to realize we are not impotent cogs but fully capable of claiming and drastically reshaping institutional power when we link up.

And this phenomenon you describe as ignoring the buzzing cloud happens fractally. Say, even at ‘progressive’ higher education institutions that publicly talk a big game about trans inclusion but then ignore the token trans voice. And she must stay silent, at least till she gets her degree 💃🏻

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PollyProletariat's avatar

Sick of bourgeois 'activists'. Just watched Laverne Cox conflating the current attacks on trans Americans with North Korea. Completely ignorant to the fact that trans people in North Korea are officially recognized, whilst in Trump's/Musk's kingdom trans people no longer exist. Presumably, this change by Trump is designed to pave the way to incarcerate trans people for mental illness reasons.

The terrible painting of the bird cage that accompanies this article represents human existence too. We live within so many different types of prisons that we've become blind to them.

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