The Other Others

Yarn with JMB trying to make sense of the marketplace of nature-based and Indigenous Knowledge-informed alternative economies and finance, in light of the rapidly changing global landscape at this fraught inflection point in history. Some ideas for hope and altering our theories of change in response to our cataclysmic new reality, pondering Serpent Lore and the brilliant 2024 film that most people missed, Blink Twice.

watch trailer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMcmfonGWY4

Imagi-Nation: https://imagi-nation.io/

The Viking Yarns are back! Rune Rasmussen in our most coherent yarn yet. I must have needed the break. I was tired as hell. Anyway, the phrase that sticks out for me is about new-ageism as 'European self-colonising whiteness'. Some deadly Viking serpent Lore as well.

Gabriella Romero and Nkwi Flores from Amazon Andes First Peoples talk about the embassy we're making with eucalypts in diaspora, Indigenous borderwork, kinmaking and migration. And the poxy US elections.

Apologies for so long between episodes. All is explained in this yarn with Kabir Kadre (wounded mystic) and Eric Hekler (former techno-utopian), as we explore the cataclysmic shifting of overton windows, faith and empiricism during the terrifying inflection point of a US election that is destabilizing systems globally.

Gumbaynggirr carver Pete McCurley is back to tell a tale of surveillance and sabotage during cultural fire management events, and the way wrong story about 'nature' and 'the wild' is preventing our communities from caring for the land. We talk about our shared inquiry working with invasive species: plant, animal and human to come into good relation and balance with biocultural systems. Turns out you can carve a decent coolamon out of radiata pine...

Walking country, reading the land and the flows and feeling what these sentient systems want to create with us, and it's all fabulous, but we're not listening to women the same way, and the land won't speak to us fully until we get that right.

Rishikes Siva takes biomimicry to the next level with Lunar Punk rhizomatic riffs, and we weave through arboretal IK at the margins of regenerative sexiness, while the brains of Elders are uploaded to the clouds and we wait to see what that rain will look like (while a tiny part of me dies inside). If more than half of that didn't make sense to you, the yarn won't either! Nerds!

Wanted to yarn with Roma, Scots, Native American, Aboriginal, queer, neuro-divergent, unhoused and trans folks about fluid border work facilitating norms of access, and about finding identity in ancestral paths rather than homelands, since global populations are becoming increasingly itinerant. But that panel would be complicated and boring, as most panels and webinars are, so we got all those people in the body of one pluriversal non-binary mongrel sibling who embodies deep time embassy for real-time contexts, Oliver Grove.

Emily McAvan queers up our ongoing narratives of embassy and quarantine as kin making rather than exclusion, as we dig deep into the foundational spiritual narratives of Purity, Toxicity, Pollution and Contagion that dominate all policy and practice around the most explosive issues of our time - immigration, medicine and wellness, environmental issues, free speech and media, marriage equality, and those pesky trans kids who think they have a right to piss and play sport.

Sorry siblings, it's been a while, but I been falling in love again, with my woman. Dougald Hine from the Dark Mountain on how love and ritual are not soft skills in the business of growing seeds of right story from the ruins of empire.

Disinformation webinar hosted by the Grata Fund 29 November 2023, with Larissa Baldwin-Roberts, Victoria Fielding, Jackie Turner, and the prick amongst the roses, Tyson Yunkaporta.

https://www.gratafund.org.au/misinformation_webinar

A peek into our wanjau process of collective sense making, applying the Ko-design methodology we've been working on for a couple of years to a textual analysis of medical disinformation.

I've recorded more on this topic (medical disinformation) this month, but the platform AI keeps taking it down - probably because of keywords and the incapacity of machines to know the difference between bunk and debunk. Anyway, my recent research has led me to believe that those radicalised online may be experiencing a similar ontological and psychological condition to displaced Indigenous people, and may benefit from the same treatment protocols Tracey Westerman devised for Aboriginal patients who are heartsick for Country.

Sara Kian Judge, Yuin woman and artist, discusses how autism helps her work with bats and sharks and see things as the Upside Down People do. We decide it's no longer 'too soon' to take the piss out of Steve Irwin, and reflect on taking responsibility for our more destructive batshit behaviours, while allowing Country to nurture our gifts.

Brother Arpad Maksay catches up to reflect on our yarn in my new book, and see where we've grown to since then when in comes to violence, public violence, and what it means to train for violence in service of a community, and whether it is possible to do this without ableism and a little bit of soft eugenics. Brother Arlo Davis drops by at the end to add some more to this, on Native storytelling and governance, and some knowledge he picked up at the latest Alaskan Federation of Natives gathering.

(Double Interrupted) So my friend Tammi Jonas from the Food Sovereignty mob has helped me start reading again and to work on my interrupting problem. I did okay here, and managed to record a whole episode without stepping all over another person's tongue. We talk about peasants and Naomi Klein's book Doppelganger, because she might be coming on our crappy little podcast soon.

Kisani Upward, Gamilaroi woman, is doing some research on Indigenous responses to natural disasters, specifically bushfires, while I work on my bad habit of interrupting (mostly by excusing it as a 'cultural thing')... Kisani convinces me that the feeling of being homesick while you're at home is not a first world problem, but a 'coping with ontological fluidity' thing.

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.

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...

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

Pete McCurley, Gumbayngiir wood carver and reluctant blacksmith, makes sense of the cautionary tales we need to find in the Dreaming of metals.

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.

Carol Sanford drops some pearls for me, you and the world, and offers teasers for her upcoming book, No More Gold Stars.

Warning: Suicide and libertarianism themes.

Deconstructing something I wrote in an altered state, which I don't remember writing, and wondering about the benefits and dangers of altered states. Sure, there are moments of genius that have utility, but you should never make decisions from that state, because you have no discernment. I believe that's why ceremony is secret and separate from daily reality, in our culture. Spiritual and secular realities need boundaries, when it comes to cognition and governance.

Rune Rasmussen returns for a messy yarn about the problematics and desperate need for rites of passage and a return to land-based culture for the Peoples of the Northern Hemisphere. Is it too late? Is it even possible to think about these things while speaking modern languages? Is dialogue and embassy between north and south possible while we are trapped in global economies of extraction?

Intimate yarn between two friends from two different families, cultures and online communities who ended up in... let's say incompatible algorithms, during Covid lockdowns, resulting in horrendously oppositional worldviews. Nothing we can't sort out with a good yarn. Because a yarn is almost like a 'conversation' but without the bullshit. Nobody is 'just asking questions' in a yarn, because you talk from your relation, not your position. The end result is not a resolution, compromise or any of that crap. It's... nah I'll let you listen through and find out for yourself.