S1E111 - Dean Spade on Mutual Aid as Preparedness pt. I

54m · Live Like the World is Dying · 05 Apr 00:13

Episode Summary

This week on Live Like the World is Dying, Margaret and Dean talk about the ways that mutual aid helps communities prepare for disasters that are already here and disasters that have yet to come.

Guest Info

Dean Spade is an American lawyer, writer, trans activist, and associate professor of law at Seattle University School of Law. You can find Dean's work at Deanspade.net, and you can read the article that Margaret and Dean talk about, "Climate Disaster is Here--And the State Will Never Save Us" on inthesetimes.com. You can also find Dean on Twitter @deanspade or on IG @spade.dean.

Host Info

Margaret (she/they) can be found on twitter @magpiekilljoy or instagram at @margaretkilljoy.

Publisher Info

This show is published by Strangers in A Tangled Wilderness. We can be found at www.tangledwilderness.org, or on Twitter @TangledWild and Instagram @Tangled_Wilderness. You can support the show on Patreon at www.patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness.

Transcript

Live Like the World is Dying: Dean Spade on Mutual Aid as Preparedness

**Margaret** 00:24 Hello and welcome to Live Live the World is Dying, your podcast for what feels like the end times. I'm your host today Margaret Killjoy. And today, I'm gonna be talking to Dean Spade, and we're gonna talk about so much stuff. We're gonna talk about so much stuff that this is going to be a two parter. So you can hear me talk with Dean this week and you can hear me talk with Dean next week. Or, if you're listening to this in some far-flung future, you can listen to it both at once in between dodging laser guns from mutants that have come out of the scrap yards, riding dinosaurs. I hope that's the future, or at least it wouldn't be boring. This podcast is a proud member of the Channel Zero Network of anarchist podcasts, and here's a jingle from another show on the network.

**Margaret** 01:53 Okay, we're back. So if you could introduce yourself with I guess your name, your pronouns, and then maybe a little bit about how you ended up doing the kind of work that led you to be on this show talking about mutual aid and collapse and preparedness?

**Dean** 02:10 Totally. Yeah, I'm Dean, I use he/him. And we could start anywhere. I became politicized primarily, like in the late 90s, living in New York City. You know, Rudy Giuliani was mayor/ There was a really vibrant, like very multi-issue, cross-class, multiracial kind of resistance happening to his range of anti-poor pro-police politics happening in the city; people, you know, in the fight around immigrant rights, in the fight around labor, sex workers being zoned out of Time Square. You know, there was just. . .it was a real moment. And I was part of queer nightlife. And people were experiencing a lot of intense policing. And a lot of us were part of work related to, you know, things that had spun off of Act Up, like a lot of direct support to people who were living with HIV and AIDS and trying to get through the New York City welfare processes, and dealing with housing. So a lot of mutual aid in that work from the get, and a lot of work related to that overlap between criminalization and poverty, from a queer, trans, feminist perspective. And that work was also tied into like, very, you know. . . a broader perspective. Like a lot of people were tied to the liberation of Puerto Rico, and the fight against the US Navy bombing Vieques, people were tied into the fight around Palestine. So it was very local--hyperlocal--New York City work, but it was very international because New York City is a very international place, and those politics were very international. So that really shaped me in a lot of ways. And I went from there to becoming a poverty lawyer and focusing on doing Poverty Law for trans people, you know, really focused on people in jails and prisons and welfare systems and immigration proceedings and foster care and stuff like that; homeless shelters. I did that for a number of years, and then increasingly felt like I. . . I just felt the real limits of doing that work as a lawyer and really prefer unpaid organizing and not being do not doing that to kind of the nonprofit and sort of like social services, legal services frame. And so my job, for now 15 years, has been that I'm a law professor. It's like a really great job that's not like. . . you know, it's not a nine to five, and that's wonderful. You don't have a boss really, and things like that. And so I teach to kind of pay my bills and what my life is really about is, you know, a lot of. . . it's been a lot of local abolitionist stuff. Like, you know, site fights around different jails and other facilities or police stations or whatever and mutual aid work and, you know, tied in for years with various aspects of like Palestine movement, especially around trying to push back against pinkwashing. And like writing stuff and making media and collaborating with artists and and, yeah. So, that's like that's that same. . .I've always think I've stayed the same, but also, I think my ideas have changed a lot over time. I've gravitated more towards anarchist or anti-state thought. And thinking a lot more in recent years about the ecological crisis and collapse and just kind of like what that means for the tactics and strategies we're all engaged in kind of all these different movements spaces.

**Margaret** 05:41 I think that that's probably--that last point--is kind of the core of what I want to ask you about and talk to you about, because while you were talking, I was thinking about how like, you know, all of these things that you're talking about--the activism you're doing in New York, for example==I mean, it's all preparedness, right? Like us, helping each other out is being. . . like, aware of actual threats and working to mitigate them? And that's what preparedness is for me, right? And, I actually think activism is a very good, solid place to come from for preparedness, right? I'd rather have a bunch of activists and organizers around me than specifically people who like, know how to skin squirrels. I like people who can do both to be honest, but you know, as compared to the traditional assumption of what a prepper or someone who's involved in preparedness, what their background would be. But I also. . .okay, so it's like I want one, I kind of wanna talk about the activist-preparedness pipeline. But the thing that I'm really excited to talk to you about is kind of the opposite, is the thing that you just brought up. What does awareness of ecological crisis do to our activism? What does it do to how we make decisions around what to prioritize? How to live? Like, for me, the thing that started this show was that I was like, "I'm very aware of this coming ecological crisis. I feel a little bit distant from other people because I feel a little bit like I'm running around screaming, 'the sky is falling.' Because I could see it and I don't understand why no one else can see it," you know? And it was basically like, how does this inform the decisions we make? Right? Which is where the title sort of literally comes from. But I think you've done a lot of work around this, around how awareness of ecological crisis impacts how we choose to be activists. And I'm wondering if you could talk about how it's impacted you or how you've learned to help communicate this to people. Right, because that's one of the biggest scary things is how do we not Chicken Little while needing to Chicken Little? You know, we need a little bit of Chicken Little--a little. Yeah, okay. I'm done.

**Dean** 08:05 I want to come back to the pipeline later. Let's remember to do that. But one thing that your question brings up for me also is just, I just want to talk--and I'm curious about your experiences of this--I want to be real about how much denial there is like. And I think this is really interesting. Like, I find an extreme amount of denial about the level of the crisis, even amongst people I know who are incredibly radical and spent their lives trying to end denial around other things they care about. Like we spent our lives trying to be like, "Look what's happening in prisons and jails in our society," or "Look at what poverty is," or "Look at what the war machine is." But then when it comes to like, "Hey, y'all, I think that, like, collapse is nigh, and that might affect our strategies." People are like, "I don't want to hear about that." Literally, "Don't talk to me about that," because it's so scary, and there's so much stress. And then I get like a certain set of like really common denial reactions like, "Well, the world has ended before." And it's like, yes, every time colonialism is happening a world, a way of life, a way people have been together is ending. Absolutely. And there is something unique and specific about this particular mass extinction event. And it's okay to say. . . it doesn't mean that those things didn't happen or aren't happening. But they're. . .but that feels to me like sometimes a phrase people use that's just like, "I don't want to think about this anymore." I'm like, let's think about that and this because actually, they're all happening together. Right? Like, obviously, colonization is ongoing and it determines who is feeling the heat fastest, you know? That, I get that one a lot or I get like, "Well, humans are bad and maybe the world should just end," kind of thing. Like, let's hasten it, or like, you know, maybe not, "Let's hasten it," but like, you know, that feels really messed up to me. That feels like skipping over and denying how much meaningful suffering we want to acknowledge and recognize and also try to prevent, and it ignores the fact that not all humans have made this happen. Actually, most humans who ever existed have fought against extraction and states and wars, and it's like just elites running state formations that have m

The episode S1E111 - Dean Spade on Mutual Aid as Preparedness pt. I from the podcast Live Like the World is Dying has a duration of 54:55. It was first published 05 Apr 00:13. The cover art and the content belong to their respective owners.

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S1E118 - Spencer on Bike Packing Pt. I

Episode Summary

This week on Live Like the World is Dying, Spencer and Inmn talk about bike packing and how cool bikes are. What is bike packing? Where can you ride? What do you need? Find the answers here.

Guest Info

Spencer can be found on IG @spencerjharding or at www.spencerjharding.com

Host Info

Inmn can be found on Instagram @shadowtail.artificery

Publisher Info

Transcript

Live Like the World is Dying: Spencer on Bike Packing Pt. I

**Inmn ** 00:15 Hello, and welcome to Live Like the World is Dying, your podcast for what feels like the end times. I'm your host today Inmn Neruin, and today we're going to be talking about something that I've been wanting to do an episode about for a really long time because I really love to do it. And I think what I'm going to learn in this interview is that I have been doing it really wrong. Or not wrong, but making it so much harder for myself. And it's just going to be...it's going to be a lot of fun. And today we're gonna be talking about different ways that you can travel long distances, or short distances over strange terrain, on a bicycle. And we're gonna be talking about bike packing. But before that, we are a proud member of the Channel Zero Net of anarchists podcasts. And here's a jingle from another show on that network. Doo doo doo doo doo. [singing]

**Dissident Island Radio ** 01:27 You're listening to Dissident Island Radio, live every first and third Friday of the month at 9pm GMT, check out www.dissidentIsland.org for downloads and more.

**Inmn ** 02:15 And we're back. Thank you so much for coming on the show today. Could you introduce yourself with your name, pronouns, and just a little bit about what you do in the world? And what you're here to tell us about today?

**Spencer ** 02:32 Hi, my name is Spencer Harding. My pronouns are he/him/his. I do a lot of things related to bikes and I have for the last...oh, at least 10 or so years. I'm currently a photographer, writer, and editor for a website called theradavist.com. We do all manner of cycling related articles and content reviews. I've worked as a bike mechanic at local community coops and full on bike shops a like, and I've been traveling by bike since 2009 pretty regularly. And that's been a huge focus of my interest in bikes and kind of my forte in bikes.

**Inmn ** 03:18 Cool, cool. Um, it's funny because I know you real life and we, you know, we like play dnd together and I actually didn't know that's what you for work. And I just knew you knew a lot about bikes. So cool, great.

**Spencer ** 03:40 I don't love that I'll know people for years and years and years and I think in a lot of the communities I've been in for years, no one really asks what anyone does. And it's not really important because we're all just doing these weird niche activities or hobbies together. And it's kind of fun.

**Inmn ** 03:55 Yeah. I'm going to immediately go offer a little script. How did you get into bikes?

**Spencer ** 04:07 I got into bikes right on the verge of the huge fixed gear craze that happened in like the early aughts.

**Inmn ** 04:18 Oh yeah, I remember.

**Spencer ** 04:21 So I was in school at Long Beach State in Southern California. I saw some people riding around bikes. It was the begining of my second year of college. I was moving off campus and I realized that I could buy a bicycle for the same price as a parking pass. And it took me as long to ride from my apartment to my classes as it did to walk from the parking lot to my class. So I took the, what, $130 that that parking pass would have been and I bought an old Schwinn off Craigslist. And it's been all downhill from there.

**Inmn ** 04:59 [Laughing] I'm sure it has not been all downhill, but I appreciate the pun. We'll get into this later, but I did a big--introduction to me and biking--is that I have always just really loved bikes. Like similarly I had this thing in high school where a car became suddenly unavailable to me. And I lived in like a suburb of a suburb of a suburb. And I was like, can I take my dad's old Schwinn that's in the in the crawl space and ride it to the city? And the answer was, yes, I could. But like, fast forward many years to going on my first bike tour, and we like went over the continental divide and I was like, "So it's all downhill from here, right?"

06:00 [Laughing] That's one of the things. You never trust the elevation profile. There's always more up somehow. You could be on top of a mountain and somehow there will be some more uphill.

**Inmn ** 06:11 Yeah. Always uphill. Always. Um, cool. Well. So yeah, let's just kind of happen to it. Um, what is like...what are the different kinds of scopes of bike travel? I feel like there's like a lot of words that were new to me as of a couple of years ago where I was just always "bike touring." But now there's all these kind of other words that people use that maybe seem like little subsets of bike touring, like gravel bikes or bike packin or r maybe there's other words that I don't know about.

06:50 There's so many buzzwords, and most of it is marketing, and like an ever smaller niche-ification of bikes. When we talk about bike travel, I think the word that comes to mind is bike touring, like, everything is bike touring. You're touring on a bike, you're riding, you're exploring, you're traveling by bike. The buzzword of the last decade has been "bike packing." And there's a lot of arguments about what that means, what that constitutes, what's bike packing, what's not bike packing. I won't go down a huge rabbit hole. I feel like the word bike packing ushered in a more modern sense of ways to pack a bicycle as opposed to what was classically bicycle touring. But if you're traveling by bike and you're strapping shit to your bike, you're going bike touring, Call it bikepacking. Call it gravel biking. You can call it...there's a multitude of other things like that. But when it boils down to it, it's all bike touring in my mind.

**Inmn ** 08:09 Yeah. Okay. Um, golly, I'm going to immediately go on another tangent because I... [Spencer encourages it] It's reminding me of like.... I suddenly found myself thinking about like, wait, I wonder if Spencer knows the history...like what the history of the development of the bicycle was? This is a question I should have sent to you yesterday. And I mean, maybe you do, maybe you don't--

08:39 I'm not super familiar. It popped in my head like I should probably do some sort of research. I mean I know the vagaries of it. But nothing specifically. I couldn't sit tell you names or dates or anything like that.

**Inmn ** 08:53 Totally. But it's like, it is something that people have...like people have been riding long distances on bikes since bikes were invented, which is something that I find really interesting. Like there's.... Which I know you could take like a rewritten fairy tale and call it like absolute historical fact, you know but have you ever had any Angela Carter books.

**Spencer ** 09:22 I haven't.

**Inmn ** 09:24 She got famous for like rewriting the for rewriting a lot of fairy tales. And people were like, "Oh, you rewrote them with like a feminist lens." And she was like, "I absolutely didn't. My goal was to bring out the innate horror in all of these stories, and these stories just happen to be really like femicide-idle. And so that reads is feminism because the main conflicts in them are misogyny." But there's this story called Lady of the House of Love. About this vampiress who like lives in a collapsing, ruinous castle in Transylvania and is the offspring of like Dracula or something, who's just like quite bored in the world at this point. And there's this like whole diatribe in the story about this guy who she lures into the castle who has been traveling around France in Europe on a bicycle. And this is my funny tie in, and this is like in... this is like, in the early days of World War Two when this... Yeah, that's what.... And it's like, it's like these little nods where I'm like, okay, it's it's a fictional story, but I'm like, that sounds like a real thing people did, just travel around Europe on a fucking bicycle.

**Spencer ** 10:56 I am 100% sure that there is some real world influence. Yeah, there's all those memes, you'll see. Like, there's some Scandinavian guy who just lived by his bike forever and ever. And, you know, big beard and all that jazz. I can't think of his name. But I can only imagine that there's some truth or they met some weird guy in a cafe one day and decided to just write them into the story after that.

**Inmn ** 11:23 Yeah. Okay, wait, but back to the things. So if you had to kind of put a definition on what bike packing is, what is bike packing?

**Spencer ** 11:37 So I would even back up to just bike travel. So bike travel is riding your bike multi day--so that could include a single night--somewhere, taking whatever you need for that journey, whatever that may be. Totally self sufficient. Maybe just change the clothes and a credit card. But using your bike as a means to explore and travel to somewhere.

**Inmn ** 12:08 Cool. Cool. That sounds right. And what.... I guess maybe this.... It's like maybe some of these specific classifications kind of seems like it maybe gets down to what kind of bike you're riding or what kind of gear you're using? Or like something? I don't know.

**Spencer ** 12:35 Yeah, there's been some discussion last few years about intent. So by touring, they've gone to the more recreational

S1E117 - Inmn and Margaret on "Civil War"

Episode Summary

This week on Live Like the World is Dying, Inmn and Margaret review the new film Civil War. Spoiler alert, it's all kinda of weird.

Host Info

Inmn can be found on Instagram @shadowtail.artificery. Margaret can be found on twitter @magpiekilljoy or instagram at @margaretkilljoy.

Publisher Info

Transcript

Live Like the World is Dying: Inmn and Margaret on Civil War

**Inmn** 00:14 Hello and welcome to Live Like the World is Dying, your podcast for what feels like the end times. I'm one of your hosts today Inmn Neruin and with me is the always lovely. . . [trails off inviting Margaret to speak]

**Margaret** 00:28 Margaret. You should do the [intro] as if I'm Garth. You should be like "And with me as always is Margaret." Like...because Wayne's World. Because I'm an elder millennial. Nevermind. Hi, I'm Margaret, I'm your other host.

**Inmn** 00:43 And today we're going to be talking about...we're kinda going to be doing a movie review about-- [Interrupted]

**Margaret** 00:49 Wayne's World.

**Inmn** 00:50 About Wayne's World, the most important movie of our time.

**Margaret** 00:53 I once...I changed my--actually I dropped out of school--but before I dropped out of school, I was gonna change my major to film because of Wayne's World. This is a true story.

**Inmn** 01:03 I love that so much. [Laughing]

**Margaret** 01:07 It's so well done. Woman-directed too. Anyway, what are we talking about?

**Inmn** 01:15 We're talking about a much less joyful movie today. And that movie is Alex Garland's Civil War. And the reason we're kind of talking about this is that I think this movie feels very relevant to--or at least when I went to go see it, I thought it would be very relevant--to some themes on the podcast. And since then, I've been a little bit confused, but we'll get into that later. And I am told that me and Margaret might have some differing opinions about this movie. And so y'all will get to see us argue.

**Margaret** 01:56 Yeah, I'm going to argue in favor of Wayne's World, and Inmn is going to argue against Civil War.

**Inmn** 02:01 Yes. But first off, we are proud members of the Channel Zero Network of anarchists podcasts, and here's the jingle from another show on that network. Doo doo doo doo doo. [singing]

**The Ex-Worker Podcast** 02:18 The Border is not just a wall. It's not just a line on the map. It's a power structure, a system of control. The Border does not divide one world from another. There is only one world, and the Border is tearing it apart. The Ex-worker podcast presents "No Wall They Can Build: A Guide to Borders and Migration Across North America," a serialized audio book in eleven chapters, released every Wednesday. Tune in at crimethinc.com/podcast.

**Margaret** 02:54 [Mimicking a movie trailer voice] In a world... [stopes voice] That's all I got.

**Inmn** 03:01 [Inmn takes up movie trailer voice] Where a vague civil war has gripped the nation for the last 14 years, we...

**Margaret** 03:12 About literally nothing.

**Inmn** 03:13 [continuing] we join a group of war correspondents and photographers who...are kind of shitbags.

**Margaret** 03:26 Don't have any motivation besides art.

**Inmn** 03:32 [Not movie trailer voice anymore] I don't really have to do a "Introduce yourself" to the thing because we all know who me and Margaret are. But to kind of get right into it, we're going to be talking about the movie Civil War today. And my hard take right now is if you haven't seen it, do NOT subject yourself to having to go see it. But, you know, make your own opinion. I'm not going to tell you what to do. But maybe we can kind of do a brief kind of like overview of the movie and then we'll get into what me and Margaret think--each separately think--about it. How's that sound?

**Margaret** 04:17 Sounds great. Am I overviewing or are you overviewing?

**Inmn** 04:20 Um, I can do it, you can do it. I don't care.

**Margaret** 04:22 Are you prepared to.

**Margaret** 04:24 I'm not. Let's do it.

**Inmn** 04:24 I'm prepared to.

**Inmn** 04:26 I'm gonna do it.

**Margaret** 04:27 Go ahead. Great. Pew, pew, pew. [mimicking gunfire] I'm gonna make pew-pew-pew noises the whole time you're talking, though, so that people get into the head of the viewer, which is that whatever's happening there's also a lot of gunfire in the background.

**Inmn** 04:39 So much gunfire. And I have something to say about that gunfire later.

**Margaret** 04:44 Okay. Okay.

**Inmn** 04:45 Yeah. Which will be very funny with the pew-pew-pews. [Margaret makes more gunfire noises] So, Civil War is a movie about a... [Margaret makes more gun and explosion noises]

**Margaret** 04:57 Okay, I'm gonna stop now. This will get old. Go ahead.

**Inmn** 05:03 The setup for Civil War is it's a movie about a Second American Civil War. And we have a few different sides in it. We have the Western Forces, which are made up of California and Texas. And they have formed a coalition of secessionist forces known as the Western Forces. And they are trying to.... All we really know is that they're trying to kill the president. And that--

**Margaret** 05:39 Relatable.

**Inmn** 05:40 Yeah, relatable. And then we have a couple other sides that never make it into the movie. There's.... The ones that do make it into the movie, we have Florida, who is attempting to join the Western Forces. And we have a few other players. The creator's that movie released a map of the US set in the time of the war. There's like the People's Army of the Northwest, or something. It's confusing. And when we join the narrative, it is...I think the war has been going on for about 14 or 15 years at this point. And the Western Forces are closing in on Washington DC and kind of like the East Coast. And we have a...we have a country that has been completely engulfed in in this war for, you know, over the last decade. And it follows a group of war photographers and journalists...correspondent people--I know words--who are out on a strange mission, which is to photograph and interview the president before he gets killed by the Western Forces. This is the setup for our protagonists' journey. And we have Kirsten Dunst as this middle-aged, jaded, war photographer, who is paired up with--I don't remember his name--

**Margaret** 07:25 Some other guy.

**Inmn** 07:26 Some other guy, who's a journalist. And as a tagalong they have this older journalist who's trying to tag along with them. He's like, old friend, co--

**Margaret** 07:42 Wise, old, Black man archetype.

**Inmn** 07:44 Wise, old, Black man archetype. And then we have a--I think she's 23 in the movie--younger, very excited, and naive photographer who is a fan of Lee (or Kirsten Dunsts' character), and they're all headed to DC to try to photograph the president before he dies and they run into a lot of wacky shenanigans along the way.

**Margaret** 08:19 It's a road trip movie.

**Inmn** 08:21 It is a road trip movie at its.... At its core, it is a road trip movie. Margaret, what.... I guess like.... I have quite a lot of opinions about this, but I'm the person who's technically hosting right now. So I'm going to ask you questions. What did you think?

**Margaret** 08:42 I think we should more duke it out a little bit. But I think we should each just give treat ourselves as having equal time on this. So I went into Civil War expecting to hate it. Most of the movie takes place in West Virginia, Western Pennsylvania, and Western Maryland. It takes place where I live. I drove to go see it in a town that is like, I think one of the towns that they filmed in and I went to the movie theater and I was like, "It's going to be all fucking chuds. It's all going to be these right-wing motherfuckers. Like I'm going into enemy territory," you know? I went to a Saturday matinee on the second day the movie was out. And there was like eight old couples. And then one dude who I read as gay, who was there alone like I was, and that's who went to go see it. Some couples in their 70s and some guy who probably went and kind of similar reason I did, to be like, "What does this have to say about the people who are trying to kill me?" you know? And I enjoyed watching it. I got some popcorn. And I watched a movie that had pretty good action, lots of loud bang noises everywhere. I was like, I was glad I saw it in the theater because it was like, I thought the audio was well done. And it seemed to me.... Okay, so it's like, if you go into it being like, this is gonna be a movie that explains where we're at in the country, It's not going to work, because it's not. And it absolutely dropped the ball on that. But that was the point. Now, I don't think that was a good point. I don't think that they made a good decision. Like, if I had made this movie, this is not how I would have made it. I enjoyed watching the movie. I also thought it was really interesting. So I went home, and I was like, "Oh, that was a...that was less bad than I expected." And it was on my mind. You know? It made me think. Mostly it made me think, "The fuck were they thinking?" But it's like, I was going to do war journalism when I was in high school and I was like, a photo, kid, you know? And then I went off to school for photography. And then I was like, "Fuck this, I'm going to drop out during the revolution," or whatever. And I very quickly was like, the idea of the neutral journalist is no

S1E116 - Tav on Waterways

Episode Summary

This week on Live Like the World is Dying, Tav and Inmn talk about the utility of waterways and the ways that industrialization has changed our relationship to waterways. Inmn learns new terrifying things about river rafting and how river guides really come up with the scariest things to name potential dangers.

Guest Info

Host Info

Inmn can be found on Instagram @shadowtail.artificery

Publisher Info

Transcript

Live Like the World is Dying: Tav on Waterways

**Inmn** 00:15 Hello, and welcome to Live Like the World is Dying, your podcast for what feels like the end times. I'm your host today Inmn Neruin, and today we're going to be revisiting a subject that we've talked about before which is paddling on water. And we're going to talk a lot about rivers and we're gonna talk about—a little bit about planning trips and just generally the importance of getting to know your local waterways, with some specific contexts on places that are really cold. But first, we are a proud member of the Channel Zero Network of anarchists podcasts, and here's a jingle from another show on that network. Doo doo doo doo doo!

**Inmn** 01:43 And welcome back. Thanks so much for coming on the show today. Could you introduce yourself and tell us just a little bit about what you—what you do in the world and what you're excited to talk about today?

**Tav** 01:59 Yeah, I'm Tav and I'm a, I guess broadly a wilderness guide from so-called Canada. Yeah, I've worked everywhere from the East Coast to Newfoundland, up to the Yukon. And yeah, I'm mostly a paddling guide, so everything from whitewater rafting, to sea kayaking, to canoeing, but I've also been known to guide hiking trips, and yeah, pretty much that's what I do.

**Inmn** 02:32 Cool, cool. That's—I feel like, you know, we've had people come on and talk about like, like arctic hiking, or hiking, or paddling, mostly in the desert, and I feel like—maybe this is just me having a very not understanding of all of these things for the most part. But what—I'm curious about, like, what kind of changes, like, in places where it gets super cold and you're having to be in the water? Which sounds cold. It sounds very cold to me.

**Tav** 03:06 Um, yeah, I think the main thing is that it really depends on what—well, first of all, what time of year it is and, like, what exactly you're doing or planning on doing. So if you're going to be running rapids, you're certainly going to get wet. And so we have these things called dry suits, which are, well, it's kind of exactly what it sounds like. It's a suit that keeps you dry. They have these rubber gaskets on your wrists and your neck. So it, like, suctions completely to your neck and your wrists and the rest of its waterproof, including the feet. And you usually have, like I have these, call them river boots, and you just put them on over the suit. And then you're nice and protected. And you can wear warm stuff underneath if it's super cold out. But personally, I run hot. So generally, I find that like, just a base layer underneath is good enough for me. Because as soon as, like it really traps in all that air, so you stay pretty, you stay pretty warm. Even if you're in like really freezing water. But in other times of year, like to be honest, in the summer here, it gets pretty hot, like people—people don't really think of it. It's not like it's frozen year round. Obviously the waters running at a certain point and, especially these days, the summers can get up to, you know, like 30 degrees. And yeah.

**Inmn** 04:40 Cool. I'm gonna pretend I know what the conversion is on that. Wow, that's hot.

**Tav** 04:46 Yeah, I mean, it is pretty—it's probably not hot for you coming from the desert actually. But yeah, I think, I think broadly the biggest thing is always, at least for me, dressing as if you're gonna fall in the water. Unless it's really hot out. If it's really hot out and you fall in, it kind of feels great. But, but if it's chilly, you always dress like you're gonna go in the water, and not like you're just gonna have a nice day on the river. And yeah.

**Inmn** 05:25 Well, I guess like, I'm curious about, like, what the kind of preparedness like like, what—like, what do you what do you do if you fall in the water? What do you do if you fall in the water and you get wet? Like, what's—and your dry suit doesn't keep you dry? These scary questions that I have about being in the wilderness and being cold and wet.

**Tav** 05:50 For sure. Definitely, I mean, so the first thing that's gonna happen it—and again, it all really depends on where you fall out. And like, because rivers are a very dynamic environment, actually, as one of my coworkers put it to me. He was more on the hiking side of things. And he told me that like paddling really scared him, because if something goes wrong on the river, you're still moving down the river as this thing is going wrong. So you have to like deal with the problem, but also maybe deal with a hazard that's like right in front of you. And then it's always about, like, figuring out what the best course of action is in regards to, like, dealing with the hazard, but also, you know, saving the person, and making sure everybody else who's still in the boat is safe. But I think broadly, what I tend to tell people if I'm taking them on a trip that's going to involve whitewater, is: the safest place on the river is in the boat. And if you're not in the boat, you should be on shore. So if I'm gonna, like, enter a bunch of rapids—and the other thing is actually, before I say that, you need to know, like, how to swim if you're gonna like be in whitewater. They call it a defensive swimming position. And you kind of sit back like you're in a lawn chair, and put your feet forward. And that way, if you like smashed into a rock, it's not your face that smashes into a rock, it's your feet. And you just kind of, like, you should have a lifejacket on. So that'll keep you floating. And, and then there's also, like, an offensive swimming position, which I wouldn't normally teach somebody, that's, yeah. Anyways, so yeah, so if I'm about to enter a bunch of rapids, I'll tend to tell people like, hey, if you do fall out, and for whatever reason you can't get back to the boat, you need to swim to the left shore or the right shore. Because sometimes it might not be safe to swim a certain direction and people don't know that and they're just gonna panic and swim whatever way seems the best. But if you let them know beforehand, like, hey, swim left, if something goes really wrong, I don't know, then they'll at least know the safer way to swim. Yeah. And then other than that, like, we have, I guess, a couple tools in our arsenal—and this should be the same with rivers everywhere. We'll have throw ropes, which are just some buoyant rope. And it's in a bag, and you throw it at people. And they should hopefully grab on to it and then you can pull them in to safety. And then there's obviously, again, like, as with all things, it can get more and more complicated depending on what the problem is. Actually, this one place I worked—I wasn't on this trip, but there was a person who got stuck on a piece of debris in the middle of a rapid which is, like, absolutely horrifying, especially because we've run that river—or that section of the river, like, a million times and that's never happened. So there was well, so—this is kind of insane, but there was a an old mill there, like a lumber mill. Or maybe it was a paper mill. I don't know, it was some industrial thing. And rather than, like, you know, when it went out of business, disposing of all the waste properly, they just decided, hey, there's this big river right there. Let's just throw the whole factory in the river. Why not? So there was all this big machinery and like metal under the water, and a lot of the rapids are actually created by that like big hunks of metal and stuff. But anyways, we had no idea that that, like, was there. And maybe it was just like the water level was perfectly right that day or perfectly wrong that day. But yeah, this person got like caught on their swim shorts, like, right on the piece of metal. And they were stuck in the middle of a rapid. So I cannot imagine what my friends went through trying to rescue that person. It must have been pretty terrifying. But yeah, so in situations like that, it would be like a much more complicated rescue than just like throwing a rope at them and hoping for the best. So yeah.

**Inmn** 10:23 Wow, that is—you unlocked a new fear for me. I thought that Blix had like gotten all of my fear out of me, you know, in horrible things that can happen in a river, and new fear unlocked. Thanks.

**Tav** 10:39 Yeah.

**Inmn** 10:43 What do you—I guess I'm curious—I guess my guess is, because boats, you just—I didn't know, boats are super interesting to me because, like you said, it's like the boat keeps moving down the river. And so it's like, I want to be like, okay, like, what, like, you know, what do you do if there's an emergency? What do you do if someone needs to be like, medivaced from an area like that? And I guess I'm expecting the answer is: put him in the boat and keep going. But—which is like a cool one interesting thing about boats, is they keep going?

**Tav** 11:20 Yeah, for sure. I mean, again, it really depends. Like everything is situational, right?

**Inmn** 11:26 Yeah yeah yeah.

**Tav** 11:27 And you really have to assess the situation and figure out what the best course of action is. Like, the best thing t

S1E115 - This Month in the Apocalypse: April, 2024

Episode Summary

This week on Live Like the World is Dying, Brooke, Margaret, and Inmn talk about some news from Gaza, the climate, hurricanes, University occupations, Texas' latest attempt to become a mini fief, abortion laws that are older than states, an update on an Arizona gun law, Taylor Swift, and TikTok.

Host Info

Inmn can be found on Instagram @shadowtail.artificery. Margaret can be found on twitter @magpiekilljoy or instagram at @margaretkilljoy. Brooke can be found on Twitter or Mastodon @ogemakweBrooke.

Publisher Info

Transcript

Live Like the World is Dying: This Month in the Apocalypse: April, 2024

**Margaret** 00:15 Hello, and welcome to Live Like the World is Dying, your podcast for what feels like the end times. Oh, wait. Brooke, you had a better... You wrote us a new jingle to sing, right? Why don't you do that right now?

**Brooke** 00:26 [Singing] I wrote us to do jingle to sing. Bling, bling, bling, bling, bling, bling, bling.

**Margaret** 00:36 And that's now our jingle forever. that doesn't even include our name in it. That's what happens when... Right before we hit record, we were like who's going to record the intro. And I was like, I'm going to record the intro because I have an idea. And my idea was to make Brooke come up with something to sing off the top of her head, because I'm a good person. But who's not a good person.... Wait, I'm not introducing the bad stuff yet. More good stuff. Also a host today is Inmn. Hi, Inmn.

**Inmn** 01:06 Hello, hello. I hope everyone is doing as well as they can in our in our great times.

**Margaret** 01:15 Statistically, at least one of you is punched a cop in the last week. So that's pretty cool. And also, we're a proud member of the Channel Zero Network of anarchist podcasts. And here's a jingle from another show on the network. [Singing] This is a new jingle for a show on the network. It goes like this.

**Margaret** 01:46 And we're back. So anything happened in the world this month, Inmn?

**Inmn** 02:22 Nope. Not at all.

**Brooke** 02:24 Everything was good. Bye, yall!

**Inmn** 02:26 Absolutely. Absolutely nothing has happened. Only sunshine.

**Margaret** 02:29 What if we just did updates about like the things that we saw on TV? I guess that's a different kind of podcast. It's the wildest thing. Velma got the Scooby Doo gang together... Anyway.

**Inmn** 02:43 We do This Month in the Apocalypse, but it's only it's only from the fictional worlds that we spend too much time inhabiting. [Everyone lauging]

**Margaret** 02:52 I conquered the entire world for my god.

**Brooke** 02:56 My child has been watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer because she's been curious about this show that was like my formative high school experience

**Margaret** 03:05 Aw, to like connect with you, watching old people shows like Buffy.

**Brooke** 03:09 Right? So that's what's happening in the world right now in my world. Yeah. Wow.

**Inmn** 03:14 You know, every once in a while it lines up though. Because, you know, I was recently watching, as part of my delve back to things I watched in high school, which is the Gilmore Girls, the family that I grew up with on TV. And they actually talk about Palestine quite often in the show. Or like they mentioned that... They mention that that stuff is happening, which lines up politically with like when the show was on the air and there was also a lot of bad stuff happening in Palestine. And but I don't think the show's creators were... They were kind of like adopting a neutral but mostly support Israel thing, which is, you know, it's--

**Margaret** 04:07 Not our line here.

**Inmn** 04:11 Which is not our line here, but is... How much can you expect from mainstream TV? Like I wasn't surprised to rewatch it and discover this.

**Margaret** 04:24 So what's our Gaza update?

**Inmn** 04:27 Yes, this is my very funny segue into Gaza stuff.

**Margaret** 04:31 No, it's good.

**Inmn** 04:32 Yeah, so... Which, I mean, there's nothing absolutely nothing funny about this. But so there's like a big... There's like big kind of like ceasefire talks happening right now, which I feel like this is something... You know, obviously people have been wanting there to be ceasefire talks for a long time and they they sort of happen and then Israel's, like, "We're not doing ceasefire talks. Fuck everyone." But they're... In this more recent round, while people kind of like imminently await a ground invasion of Rafah, which like the last little southern piece of Gaza that pretty much everyone who lives in Gaza has been forced into. And Hamas has responded to a call for ceasefire negotiation talks, saying that in order to start negotiations, they need for there to be a ceasefire. And part of part of what they're asking for at this point is like, yeah, we're willing to talk about hostage stuff, because I think they are still like 130 hostages, or something--

**Margaret** 06:03 Which is sort of--like from a pure detached point of view--like kind of impressive that they've still held on to these hostages, as the entire region falls?

**Inmn** 06:16 Yeah, yeah. And--

**Margaret** 06:20 Like, tactically impressive.

**Inmn** 06:25 Yeah. And they. So, kind of what they're asking for is like, yeah, we're willing to play ball. We're willing to do... like, we're willing to release hostages. But what we what we need is for Palestinian people to have basic human rights, and to not get bombed, and for there to be a ceasefire. And what do you think Israel's response to these like, pretty, pretty basic requests were?

**Margaret** 06:56 Did they build a time machine to kill all the peoples'.... No, they probably already did kill all those people's parents. Nevermind. Something really disproportionately, impressively evil. That's my guess.

**Inmn** 07:12 Yeah, well, it's kind of like.... So you know how this thing happens in politics, sometimes, where people kind of talk up a response as being much more internally conflictual than it actually is? The same things kind of happening in Israel were awaiting Netanyahu's response, like all of the like defense, prime ministers and stuff have been like, "If you don't continue with a ground invasion, we're abdicating and your government's going to fall apart." And Netanyahu was has vowed multiple times that regardless of whether negotiations happen, or there is a ceasefire, that a ground invasion of Rafah will happen. So it's kind of like fake strife, like fake internal strife. You know? Cool. And, yeah, that's kind of the state of the ceasefire talks. And something... This is just a piece that I've been trying to learn a little bit more about, which is a topic on a lot of people's mind, which is like, "Jey, Egypt, what's up? Why aren't you letting people into Egypt to escape genocide?" And there's kind of a few different factors at place. And one interesting development on that is that Egypt has started to build a buffered wall zone. Like a border between the border kind of thing. Which is just like a giant concrete pen that can fit about 150,000, people that they're building in anticipation of the border between Rafah and Egypt rupturing during Israel's ground invasion of Rafah, which they've... which Israel's all but announced is imminently going to happen. And likepart of what Egypt has said about this is they have been saying like, "Oh, well, we don't want to let people cross over into Egypt because we don't want people to then not be allowed back into Palestine when the war is over." It's kind of like this farcical idea that Israel's gonna do a war, take care of Hamas, and then just like peacefully leave Palestinians to like go about their lives.

**Margaret** 09:47 Yeah, I mean, like, it is true that... It certainly seems likely to me that Israel will not let anyone back in after they leave because Israel seems pretty clear that their goal--and has been their goal since 1895. Can I tell you a thing I learned about this? Sorry.

**Inmn** 10:05 Yeah, absolutely, please.

**Margaret** 10:09 I'm not sure when this podcast comes out. I just recently recorded, and it'll be out around the same time, an episode of Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff about Palestinian resistance to the British Mandate of Palestine, basically the period between 1917 and 1948. Well, technically, the Mandate kicked in, in 1922. But after the British control started, right? And in that I learned a little bit more--like maybe a lot of the listeners already know this stuff--but everything that's happening now was in the diaries, and often public statements, of all of the founders of the State of Israel, down to very specifically like, "No, we are going to absolutely remove all of the--" they would never use the word Palestinians. They wouldn't even use the word Arabs. They specifically only said "non Jewish people" when they refer to the people who are already living in Palestine. And it's just really, blatantly clear that since the beginning, the project of Israel has been not just to create an Israeli State--or sorry, a Jewish state--but to remove non Jewish people.

**Inmn** 11:24 Yeah, yeah. And it's--yeah. Which it's like part of that, that makes it really confusing to see Egypt's response--

**Margaret** 11:35 I mean, I'm sure they're still doing it because they're bastards. But that part about like, oh, well, no one would be allowed back. That's probably true.

**Inmn** 11:45 But it's probably true regardless. A

S1E114 - Colin on Flood Plains and Water Damage

Episode Summary

This week on Live Like the World is Dying, Colin and Brooke talk about flooding, water damage, and how to avoid having your home damaged by those things.

Guest Info

Colin (he/him) is a carpenter, industrial electrician, and backpacker.

Host Info

Brooke can be found on Twitter or Mastodon @ogemakweBrooke.

Publisher Info

Transcript

Live Like the World is Dying: Colin on Flood Plains and Water Damage

**Brooke ** 00:15 Hello and welcome to Live Like the World is Dying, your podcast for what feels like the end times. I'm Brooke Jackson, your host for this episode. And today our friend Colin is joining us again, this time to talk about flooding and dealing with water damage. But first we'd like to celebrate being a member of the Channel Zero Network of anarchist podcasts by playing a little jingle from one of the other podcasts on the network. Doo doo jingo here!

**Brooke ** 01:40 And we're back. Colin, thank you for joining us again today. And this time to talk about dealing with floods and water damage. Would you remind your pronouns, where you hail from if you want, and a bit about your background?

**Colin ** 01:52 Yeah, my name is Colin, he him. I'm from Pittsburgh. And I've been a contractor sort of on and off for the last about 20 years, as well as working in the power plants and industrial electricity, and sort of in and around industry for about the second half of my life. And, yeah, it's, I'm glad to talk about floods, because it's one of those things we're seeing more and more. And unfortunately, it's probably going to happen to pretty much everybody who's listening to this podcast at some point in their life in one form or another.

**Brooke ** 02:27 Yeah. And we've talked about flooding on the podcast before. I don't know that we've ever done a whole episode on it by any means. But it has definitely come up as we've talked about news and other major events. And you and I even talked about it when we did our first episode, a little bit. So I think it's—itll be good to dig into, you know, a nice reminder of what to do and not to do in a flood. And then also, I don't think we've ever talked much about flood recovery. So I'm excited to learn and teach more about that today. I wanted to share one of my own stories about flooding, if you don't mind me kicking off with that before we get into all the do's and don'ts and how tos.

**Colin ** 03:12 Yeah go for it.

**Brooke ** 03:13 Okay, cool.

**Colin ** 03:14 Everybody's got one of those stories.

**Brooke ** 03:16 Seems like it. Well, when I was growing up in the 90s, there was a major flooding event where I live. My hometown. It was built around a river, which of course is true of most older cities, right, because access to fresh water is critical for survival. And then there are also a lot of creeks that run through my town and feed into the river. And I live in the Pacific Northwest and it rains a whole lot here. So we're kind of accustomed to having occasional sudden and heavy downpours and the possibility of some rainwater pooling or briefly flooding. It's not uncommon. But this particular event when I was a teenager was something else. It was a really complicated set of weather events that led to it. But the important part is that, so the creeks that are all over town are overflowing. And then the river, it doubled its level on the first day of the heavy rains. And then within the next two days had crashed at its banks, and then for three days after that remained at flood levels. So the city's downtown area, for instance, it's fairly flat, it's right along the river, and most of the homes there have basements. So in addition to streets flooding, the basements flooded, filled with water. There were houses that got washed off their foundations, of course cars got washed away. And then even in other parts of town where there wasn't, you know they were more on the hills or what have you, there was so much water in the ground that it caused foundational issues to a lot of houses because the pressure of the water pushing on home foundations are running around it. And there had been an ice event right before the rain started that had caused his damage to a lot of pipes. So there were pipes that were bursting and breaking because they'd been weakened or already had broken because of the ice storm. And it led to all this flooding. And it's interesting as I've grown up in the town and come back to it as adult, that the damage of this event, the way it's imprinted itself on the psyche of the city, even my mom, when she comes back to visit will drive around, she'll go, oh, you know, such and such creek looks a little high today. You know, this creek is, you know, she always looks around at all the creeks to see where the waters levels are kind of this caution about how high is the water. Like, are we in danger of having some kind of event again. And anyone that lived here, you know, had or knew someone that had some kind of really severe damage or loss because of that flood. So that's really imprinted into my psyche because, of course, I was still a young person at the time this happened. And it's really impactful to me. So when we talk about flooding, it's like, oh, yeah, that was one of the major traumatic events of my youth, at least collectively in my society or my, you know, my town.

**Colin ** 06:13 Yeah, that's actually a really common situation you describe, of having an ice event or cold weather and then a warm front comes through, drops several inches of rain onto frozen ground, there's nowhere for it to go, and it just goes straight into rivers. Like you're seeing that more and more and that's actually exactly what I was gonna open with is that, with climate change, even if you're not living in someplace like Charleston, or Miami, or one of the other low lying areas that everybody knows is at risk for flooding either from rising ocean levels or because you're in a major floodplain. Just having these wild swings in temperature and rainfall makes flooding a much bigger issue. It's like living in Pittsburgh, it seems like we don't get mild old rains anymore, we either get four inches right now, or nothing. So it's not the, like, nice, gentle soaking rains that I remember from being a kid, it's like everything comes in a burst. And when that happens, dry ground does not soak up water nearly as well as slightly damp ground. So dropping lots of rain onto parched ground, you end up with lots of run off, and even though it's very, very dry, you end up with massive flooding.

**Brooke ** 07:35 Yeah, one of our cohosts and one of the collective members was—we were talking about it and she was describing, like, if you go to water your garden and you haven't watered your garden in a while, and like the first water that you put on, it kind of rolls off. It takes it a minute to actually, like, settle and sink in, and then it's easier to water the ground. And it's the same kind of thing with these flooding events which I, you know, had never thought about but can picture in my mind how that, oh yeah, how that happens, how that works. So it's, you know, we're at risk of flooding for so many different reasons than ever we were before because of super dryness or, you know, I feel like we've seen more atmospheric rivers in the news as well. Maybe I'm just paying more attention, but that seems to becoming more common too.

**Colin ** 08:26 Yeah, and with the big events, like, there is a definite limit on how much you can really do to prepare yourself short of just moving to someplace where these things don't happen, you know. Somebody told me, water always wins.

**Brooke ** 08:44 Ah!

**Colin ** 08:45 You're not going to beat it. It's heavy, it's powerful, and if it wants to come into your house, you're gonna have a really hard time stopping it.

**Brooke ** 08:56 Okay.

**Colin ** 08:57 You know, you can fight back against the inch or two, but if nine feet of water comes knocking at your front door, you're not gonna win.

**Brooke ** 09:06 Sure, but surely there are some things that we could do that would, you know, maybe help prevent the smaller amounts of water or help make it less bad, yeah?

**Colin ** 09:16 Oh, yeah, definitely. And especially if you're in one of the areas like sounds like you are, or like I am in Pittsburgh, where there's enough terrain that I'm not worried about a flood filling up the valley nine feet deep, because if that happens, you know, we have bigger problems. The issue is more, you know, an inch or two of water flowing along the surface running down the street, coming across the yard and down to the basement steps. Like that kind of stuff you can defend against, and it's really not that hard to do. But it takes a lot of preparation and, particularly if you're in an area where this has simply never happened before, it's very easy for that to catch everyone off guard. Sounds like that's the situation with the floods you described was this was what used to be a what they call, you know, a 100 year storm.

**Brooke ** 10:07 Uh huh, uh huh!

**Colin ** 10:09 Now the 100 year storms are happening every six months or so.

**Brooke ** 10:13 Yeah, well, we haven't, you know, had another one quite like that since the 90s. But also, I know that a lot of, you know, houses and whatnot are much better setup for it, you know. For instance, the downtown houses that got basements flooded so badly, a lot of them—I want to say all of them, but that might not be true—had sump pumps

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