The Other Others

Guy Ritani (Permaqueer activist, Maori science communicator) asks me, "Any whale stuff coming up for you lately?" Hell yes! A hard yarn about radioactive whales, skepticism vs cultural knowledge, what is real vs what is true, trauma, making sense, and discerning between spirit and bullshit. There are conflicts, maintaining both identity and intellectual rigor in this howling red-faced modernity. No apologies for sound quality - don't be such a spoiled techno-brat! Suck it up and pretend it's the 70's again....

There is more to the disinformation being deployed in Australia's referendum (for an Indigenous voice to parliament) than meets the eye. This episode is something of a diatribe. I'm tying together all our true stories of resistance and putting a firewall between them and the fantasies of white supremacists and disgruntled settlers who are co-opting the language and Lore of our ongoing occupation and struggle, to secure our support in extreme libertarian radicalisation and stochastic terrorism in Australia and abroad. These things have been under-reported, and you can't imagine how extensive and pervasive these networks of chaos are.

Tammi Jonas from the Australian Food Sovereignty Network despairs with me a while as we try to figure out why half our friends went crazy over Covid lockdowns and are now marching with white supremacists, promoting soft-eugenics and even calling vaccinated Aboriginal people 'pharma-colonists' who are pursuing genocidal policies against 'heterodox' settlers. AFSA: https://www.pozible.com/project/eating-democracy/comments 

Thought experiment as data collection for a research project conducted by expert on digital writing and AI, Lucinda McKnight. I said I'd only give her my qualitative data in yarn form, on a podcast, and she was keen. It was a good idea, but as usual I ruin everything for everybody with my relentless blakpilling...

The sacred feminine in landscapes rendered profane by moral prudery - we walk these storied paths fearlessly with Manchan Magan in a mythical relation across hemispheres, a vibrant embassy between Ireland and Aboriginal Australia, grieving the loss of Sinead together and celebrating what is emergent in our deadly relation. https://www.instagram.com/p/CvvD9r7tLxn/

Big mixed up yarn with Steph Beck and Ben Knight, Indigenous views on relational economics and logical fallacies, and where the two meet in cults and guru-generated content. How can we tell the difference between good faith and bad faith claims, and who has the right to be heard in this world? (Spoiler: we arrive at the idea that maybe bad faith discourse comes from people who have figured out they can skip meaning-making and go straight to change-making/decision-making by extracting authority from nothing, using logical fallacies as discursive technologies of despair...) Episode art by David McMillan

In this episode, Pete McCurley, a Gumbayngiir wood carver and reluctant blacksmith, discusses topics such as coping with grief through art, the impact of a devastating storm on cultural food plants, personal development and leaving a lasting impact, challenges in forging a keel bolt, the importance of community support, and transformation of wrong stories into cautionary tales.

Groovy de-colonial yarn with exo-ethno-botanist Cobi Calyx. Everything from Terra Nullius to Matt Damon.

You're in a proper yarn here, involving you, me, Beckett Carmody, a giant frog, wild cats and a robot. Beckett is finding adaptive Lore to bring cats and weeds into proper relation with place. There may even be room for AI fetuses like language model bots if somebody can tinker with the decision trees a bit. Best yarn ever if you want to learn about proper time, place, story and relation.

Yolande Brown and me are doing voice-work and writing for an animated film, and decided to yarn for a vocal warm-up before studio time. Recorded it just in case we said anything worth sharing. For me it's back-catalogue content, so skip my bits, but Yo says some calming and measured things that are a soothing balm in the world of thinkers and changemakers, that roiling sea of panic and doom and frantic hope.