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Trigger warning: violence and death. Photos by Fabio Teixeira, taken on February 11, 2022 in Vila Cruzeiro, Rio de janeiro. The content of this photojournalistic series poses an ethical conundrum to me as a writer and is deserving of a stern trigger warning. The term ‘trigger warning’ is often associated with so-called woke culture and “social justice warriors”, but, here, I use it in quite a literal sense. Actual triggers have been pulled, and are you prepared to see photographic evidence of the consequences? On the one hand, to reproduce these images is, also, to reproduce the barbaric violence depicted in them. On the other hand, perhaps, being exposed to it, as a reader and as a citizen, may provide the dose of reality needed to spark a combative awareness, which can be used to stir real change. Change not only in which triggers are being pulled where and when. Change in how we speak about each other and to each other. The words used to describe what happened in Rio de Janeiro on February 11th, 2022, have been mostly based on that the Brazilian Military Police had to report. “Criminals” were shot in a favela. They are unidentified, nameless, but there were 8, and they were “marginals”. According to the police’s spokesperson, they were after Chico Bento, a leader of Rio’s largest criminal organization, who got away by using young, poor and black civilians as shields. In other words, the wanted man escaped because the police were aware of the strategy and unwilling to sacrifice innocent lives. Lives were sacrificed nevertheless, shamelessly and savagely. The remains treated inhumanely, perhaps only as a final reflection of how the bodies were treated when they were alive — and the brutality continues in the dissemination of the rhetoric around who these people were. In this peace-less rest, not only the dead are victims. A whole community is subjected to the dehumanizing narrative used by the police, and perpetuated by mass media, to justify unjustifiable actions. So, instead of repeating what has already been said about this case — which favela, which gang leader, how many weapons, how many drugs — here we ought to discuss what the consequences of these police operations are. There is no evidence that Military Police operations or the presence of the Pacifying Police Unit in Rio’s favelas has achieved any success in dwindling the illegal drugs and weapons industry. Marginalized communities are terrorized by the police as much as they are by local traffickers. In fact, marginalized black communities have been terrorized by authorities since before the existence of organized crime, even before the existence of the police or the State which it protects. What is organized crime? Firstly, there must be the concept of a crime, defined by law, and backed by governmental institutions. And for it to be organized, it must be bigger than a single infraction, big enough to become a parallel and profitable industry. Favelas became organized enough to endure a legacy of terror which has persisted for half a millennium. The police force which execute “pacifying” operations in the favelas was created before the Brazilian State was formed, to hunt down enslaved people who ran away. The policing institution precedes the constitution and the establishing of basic human rights. What distinguishes organized crime from failed police intelligence operations is the backing of the Authorities, whichever they may be. Throughout history, we have witnessed shifts in institutional authority, from the Monarchy, to the Republic, to a modern constitution. But the Police Force has remained, it commits crimes, it sometimes aids organized criminal organizations, but it has succeeded in controlling the narrative. The steering of public discourse is the most valuable tool of an institution. Its ability to summon support is the secret to its longevity. When it comes to the police, the narrative that “marginals”, “criminals”, are nothing more than just that has not only maintained but fed a thirst for blood in much of the population. Gun-loving Bolsonaro supporters lust after the brutal punishment of criminals, reveling over robberies-gone-wrong videos online. The slogan from the 80s, created by a Rio de Janeiro Police Chief, is still massively popular: “A good thug is a dead thug” (“Bandido bom é bandido morto”). There is no doubt Brazil lives under a political strategy of extermination, the question is which narrative a citizen buys into. One which propagates the idea that some people deserve to die because they are nothing more than marginal criminals. And another, which believes all people deserve dignity. There are no criminals, there are people who commit crimes. There are no marginals, there are people who have been marginalized. There are no slaves, there are people who have been enslaved. When we fail to see the humanity in others, we fail it in our selves. Perhaps, by being confronted with images of dignity being savagely denied to others, we may fight for their dignity as much as we fight for our own. _______ Mirna Wabi-Sabi is a writer, editor, and translator from Brazil. She is the founder of the Plataforma9 initiative and the author of the bilingual pocket book Anarcho-Transcreation (Anarco-Transcriação).

People are able to organize very complex distribution and exchange mechanisms in a very short time without the intervention of state institutions. Even if one didn’t have an immediate experience of disaster at the doorstep — like flood, storm or wildfire, which are happening globally on a weekly basis affecting many millions of people — we all share an experience of global surge of mutual aid during the COVID-19 pandemic. In many places, it implied a different relation to material reality such as provision of food, medics and, in peculiar cases, toilet paper. In non middle-and-up-class contexts, the pandemic increased risk of losing the roof over head or being stuck below dignifying conditions in at home. This intense period became a sharp reminder of local sufficiency, the scale of our community, and the importance of understanding a home as space that goes beyond our rented or owned four walls. While asked to distance ourselves for solidarity, we soon understood what are the outlines of our dependency on others, including both closest circles and large global supply chains. What role will these dependencies and material sufficiency have in a degrowth future? When speaking of degrowth, I optimistically account collective action to mitigate coming disasters and to reorganize society around a different material reality — one that recognizes limits. Written by Jere Kuzmanić Edited by Mirna Wabi-Sabi Read it in full at Abeautifulresistance.org

It's with great sadness that we learn of the passing of one of the most influential feminist voices — bell hooks. She was an inspiration to me as a thinker and writer. The issues discussed in her conversation with Laverne Cox about reproducing white patriarchal beauty standards, her comments on Beyoncé's failure at representing black women, and her call out of white feminism in From Margin to Center have always been present in my intellectual production. My work would have not been the same without her, and the future, if it's up to me, will be forever marked by her legacy — her books. Resources: FEMINIST THEORY from margin to center FEMINISM IS FOR EVERYBODY By Mirna Wabi-Sabi

The triple crisis we are currently experiencing — financial, public health and climate — reveals the paradoxical character of the capitalist discourse and its original idea of “progress” and “growth”. As the book Design, Method and Industrialism by Freddy van Camp et al. (1998) recalls, the union of Design with the business environment was a bet of the 1950s/60s, significantly marked by post-war developmental thinking. There was no guarantee that betting on this alliance was the ideal path to “progress”, nor was there a concern with the environment, since in the prevailing view of the time, nature would be an infinite and controllable resource. Written by Isabel Elias Edited by Mirna Wabi-Sabi Read it at Abeautifulresistance.org

“Government investments in public transport systems may very well be exacerbating inequality due to their direct ties with the global capitalist system.” To claim that investment in public transportation goes against the interests of low-income workers is counterintuitive. It is expected that the highest someone’s income is, the less likely they are to rely on buses to get around. Therefore, if money is spent to make improvements in this sector, we naturally expect investments to target users’ interests and well-being. And, because of this expectation, whenever buses are vandalized during a protest, many observers perceive this destruction as symbolic of ungratefulness — to bite the hand that feeds. Could it be, however, that investment in public transport in fact leads to disadvantages to the lowest income working population? Written by Mirna Wabi-Sabi Photographed by Fabio Teixeira Read it at Abeautifulresistance.org

Banning burkinis, the War on Terror and the US occupation of Afghanistan have nothing to do with improving the lives of women. Why, then, did Women’s welfare become central to any discussion about these topics? To wage War in the name of Human Rights is an oxymoron. Nevertheless, this is exactly how the United States, and its mass media, is diverging attention from the fact that it has just lost another war. Feminism and LGBTQ+ rights was never the motivation behind the occupation of Afghanistan. And yet, the Taliban’s treatment of women and gays seems to be at the forefront of all mediatic discussion about the pulling-out of American troops. As a woman, it’s pertinent to honestly show how uncomfortable it is to see Women’s rights being used to paint a racist imperialist regime in good light. To pair concerns for the educational future of Afghan girls with demands for the extermination of “primitive” Islamists feels like using feminism as a veil for islamophobia. Women’s rights are violated everywhere in the world, every day. Could it be that we lack perspective on the gendered violence present in the Christian world because we are submerged in it? Written by Mirna Wabi-Sabi Read it at Abeautifulresistance.org

In English as pocket-book and PDF. Quem lê, já leu uma tradução. Mesmo que o texto não seja uma tradução, ele possivelmente alude a uma. Quem não lê, já foi exposto a uma ideia que foi traduzida, seja ela na 'Sessão da Tarde', na reza ou no nome da companhia para qual alguém trabalha. Esse livro é, portanto, não só para pessoas que traduzem, ele é para qualquer pessoa que tem interesse em saber como ideias e pensamentos são compartilhados pelo mundo. Edição atual da revista Lucía v. 1 n. 1 (2021) Issn 2763-521X lançamento 08/03/2021 Escrito por Mirna Wabi-Sabi Leia na Tenda de Livros

In my view, Africana womanism has been the most effective anti-fascist strategy Brazil has ever seen, tackling all realms of oppression from self-esteem to material conditions, infrastructure, community development, and, most importantly, survival. Unlike Western patriarchy, which feeds competition, individualism, and authority through the use of violence or force, the ‘matricommunity’ guarantees all the basic spiritual and practical needs [1] that a fascist government not only fails to provide, but systematically deprives in order to marginalize and exterminate an unwanted contingent of the population. Written by Mirna Wabi-Sabi Read it at Abeautifulresistance.org

By René L. P. Mahieu ABSTRACT Collectively exercising the right of access: individual effort, societal effect The debate about how to govern personal data has intensified in recent years. The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation, which came into effect in May 2018, relies on transparency mechanisms codified through obligations for organisations and citizen rights. While some of these rights have existed for decades, their effectiveness is rarely tested in practice. This paper reports on the exercise of the so-called right of access, which gives citizens the right to get access to their personal data. We study this by working with participants—citizens for whom the law is written—who collectively sent over a hundred data access requests and shared the responses with us. We analyse the replies to the access requests, as well as the participant's evaluation of them. We find that non-compliance with the law's obligations is widespread. Participants were critical of many responses, though they also reported a large variation in quality. They did not find them effective for getting transparency into the processing of their own personal data. We did find a way forward emerging from their responses, namely by looking at the requests as a collective endeavour, rather than an individual one. Comparing the responses to similar access requests creates a context to judge the quality of a reply and the lawfulness of the data practices it reveals. Moreover, collective use of the right of access can help shift the power imbalance between individual citizens and organisations in favour of the citizen, which may incentivise organisations to deal with data in a more transparent way. ABSTRACT From dignity to security protocols: a scientometric analysis of digital ethics Our lives are increasingly intertwined with the digital realm, and with new technology, new ethical problems emerge. The academic field that addresses these problems—which we tentatively call ‘digital ethics’—can be an important intellectual resource for policy making and regulation. This is why it is important to understand how the new ethical challenges of a digital society are being met by academic research. We have undertaken a scientometric analysis to arrive at a better understanding of the nature, scope and dynamics of the field of digital ethics. Our approach in this paper shows how the field of digital ethics is distributed over various academic disciplines. By first having experts select a collection of keywords central to digital ethics, we have generated a dataset of articles discussing these issues. This approach allows us to generate a scientometric visualisation of the field of digital ethics, without being constrained by any preconceived definitions of academic disciplines. We have first of all found that the number of publications pertaining to digital ethics is exponentially increasing. We furthermore established that whereas one may expect digital ethics to be a species of ethics, we in fact found that the various questions pertaining to digital ethics are predominantly being discussed in computer science, law and biomedical science. It is in these fields, more than in the independent field of ethics, that ethical discourse is being developed around concrete and often technical issues. Moreover, it appears that some important ethical values are very prominent in one field (e.g., autonomy in medical science), while being almost absent in others. We conclude that to get a thorough understanding of, and grip on, all the hard ethical questions of a digital society, ethicists, policy makers and legal scholars will need to familiarize themselves with the concrete and practical work that is being done across a range of different scientific fields to deal with these questions. ABSTRACT Measuring the Brussels Effect through Access Requests: Has the European General Data Protection Regulation Influenced the Data Protection Rights of Canadian Citizens? We investigate empirically whether the introduction of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) improved compliance with data protection rights of people who are not formally protected under GDPR. By measuring compliance with the right of access for European Union (EU) and Canadian residents, we find that this is indeed the case. We argue this is likely caused by the Brussels Effect, a mechanism whereby policy diffuses primarily through market mechanisms. We suggest that a willingness to back up its rules with strong enforcement, as it did with the introduction of the GDPR, was the primary driver in allowing the EU to unilaterally affect companies' global behavior. [From the Plataforma9 family]

In English here. El último sábado de agosto, prendí las luces del balcón e una nube de termitas corrió hacia las lámparas. Se arrojaron contra la ampolleta nerviosamente y cubrieron cada centímetro de la pared. Una mariposa voló entre ellos, desorientada. Y una lagartija estaba allí, verticalmente, al lado de una de las lámparas, emocionada, pero en gran desventaja numérica. Es el comienzo de la primavera, hora de salir en la búsqueda por nuevos apareamientos, con la ayuda de la luna. Entonces, pasé un tiempo en el oscuro mientras las termitas se orientaban. Al día siguiente, a pesar de la pandemia, la gente llenó las playas para disfrutar del sol. El invierno se terminó y también el aislamiento. Los humanos, en muchos sentidos como un enjambre de termitas, tienen instintos que no les dejan acompañar los cambios drásticos del contexto. La luna ya no es la única fuente de luz en esta tierra — que antes era un pedazo de bosque atlántico costero. Aunque seamos adaptables encontramos maneras de racionalizar comportamientos irracionales para retrasar los cambios. Ciertas cosas ya cambiaron, irreversiblemente, como la manera que nuestros cuerpos existen en el mundo y lo influencian. Nuestros cuerpos son importantes, por lo tanto la distancia entre ellos también importa. Así como las termitas son importantes para el mundo — un mundo que no circunda solamente los bienes humanos — ellos ayudan a descomponer los cuerpos de los árboles muertos, devuelven los nutrientes al suelo abriendo el camino para una nueva generación de árboles. Como nosotros, a ellos también les gustan los cadáveres de los árboles, aunque practiquen este culto de forma mas sostenible. ¿De qué formas insostenibles ​​practicamos nuestra devoción? Poniéndonos devotos del dinero, de otras personas o de nuestro propio cuerpo, puede ser que estemos practicando rituales que no solamente nos aleje de las cosas que mas valoramos, sino que también pueden destruirlas. El instinto de socializar y tomar el sol, por ejemplo, como homenaje a las personas que amamos, incluye a nosotras mismas, aunque tuviera validez antes del año 2020, hoy puede ser una maldición más. Así como las termitas tuvieron la capacidad de disfrutar de la luz de la luna, aunque se distraen con una luz bastante débil solamente por su cercanía, al encontrar nada más allá del vidrio, concreto y de madera químicamente tratada. El COVID-19 y el aislamiento puede haber remodelado la forma como vemos nuestros cuerpos en el mundo y, por lo tanto, va a remodelar la practica de nuestra devoción, en lo que sea. Esto no es algo malo, las tradiciones pueden evolucionar para volverse aún más poderosas. En cierto modo, es por el cambio que nos ponemos devotos. Si alguien adora la riqueza, aunque la idea que hacemos de ella pueda ser inmutable, el deseo es que se cambie la cuantidad de la riqueza. Mismo en la adoración de las deidades, por eternas que sean, son consideradas con poder de Cambio. Yo fui una de las personas que fueron a la playa en este domingo, sin saber que formaba parte de un enjambre. La multitud me sorprendió y me hizo super-consciente de no estar usando un barbijo. Lo más sorprendente, sin embargo, fue percibir que ahora me dio una sensación fragilizada de lo que mi cuerpo es capaz, de lo que puede soportar y de como las cosas pueden amenazarlo. Yo solía ser tan desteñida, andar en bicicleta entre los autos, escalar las enormes rocas en la playa, explorando senderos escondidos y mirando hacia abajo del acantilado. Probablemente sea seguro decir que el año 2020 nos hizo sentir vulnerables ​y muchos de nosotros simplemente no queremos aceptarlo pero existen nuevas formas de reconstruir la confianza en nuestros cuerpos, solamente tenemos que querer buscarlas. Ciertas cosas cambian y volver a las antiguas formas de afrontarlas puede ser contraproducente. Especialmente para aquellos de nosotros que quieren seguir resistiendo a los cambios, es importante mantener nuestros objetivos inmutables para que conozcamos a las tácticas cambiantes ​​en las que podemos confiar para alcanzarlas de manera efectiva, sin distraernos con cosas brillantes en el camino. ________ texto: Mirna Wabi-Sabi traducción: Marina Mayumi revisión: Angely Zambrano

Show Notes Whatever one’s conception of “God” is, “John of God” should now be a nauseating name. For decades, João Teixeira de Faria pretended to heal an endless stream of pilgrims to his center in rural central Brazil through the Spiritist practice of “psychic surgery.” In reality, the miracle healing claims worked to cover up an obvious truth. João was sexually assaulting and raping women, in public and in private, likely every day of his “working” life. As he did so, he amassed a vast fortune in affiliate businesses, farming operations, real estate, referral rackets, and sales of crystals and fake remedies. In this episode we won’t retell this history, now poignantly captured by a new Brazilian-made documentary on Netflix. Instead, we’ll look at how lazy and motivated journalism shook hands with the entrepreneurial New Age to validate and accelerate the absurd claims of a monster. In addition to original reporting on how João made his mark in the U.S., Matthew is joined by former New Age publicist Lisa Braun Dubbels and Brazilian journalist Mirna Wabi Sabi to discuss the globalization of magic and abuse. Trigger warnings for this episode: rape, sexual assault, fraud, spiritual abuse. 02:17 John of Fraud 1:16:22 Interview w/Lisa Braun Dubbel & Mirna Wabi-Sabi Listen at Conspirituality.net

"Bloodthirsty savagery", which is often attributed to the Mayan people, far better describes U.S. foreign policy than any pre-Columbian civilization in the Americas. We ought to remember that the Mayan people still exist today, and they were and still are far from the backwards and underdeveloped stereotype propagated in mainstream media. Written by Mirna Wabi-Sabi Read it at Abeautifulresistance.org