Transe8

The Netflix series, Sense8, creation of Lana and Lilly Wachowski (formerly the Wachowski siblings, formerly the Wachowski brothers, creators of The Matrix) is certainly sensual. The eight characters in the Homo (Sapiens) Sensorium ‘cluster’ spend their time eating, drinking, taking drugs, fighting, crying, peeing, smoking, overlooking stunning panoramas, bleeding, lighting incense, playing music, almost getting killed – and, yes, an inordinate amount of time kissing and copulating. The alternation of boom and bust, tension and release, is the standard addiction strategy designed to up ratings. And I bet they’re really high. The budget certainly is.

Netflix seems to have a formula for its most popular shows and it goes something like this:

Mildly-marginalised able-bodied Middle-American White girl beats all the boys and the blonde Complete Bitch with the aid of her three less in-the-frame friends: Black (with European features)/ East Asian; gay/ trans; fat/ disabled.

The formula enables middle-class White female viewers, and those who “identify” with them, to see themselves as courageous and progressive – while completely ignoring their privilege – by blaming everything on men of any ethnicity (and any White woman they feel is even more privileged in terms of beauty or wealth). Onscreen, there’s typically a lot of the protagonist going “who, me?” while taking out her closely-typed Oscar acceptance speech.

The formula isn’t closely followed in Sense8 because there are (supposedly) 8 protagonists, all are able-bodied and attractive, and the representation is slightly more varied:

	M/ F/ M-F	White US/ N. European	Hispanic	East Asian	South Asian	Black African
Capheus	M					X
Kala	F				X
Lito	M		X
Nomi	M-F	X
Riley	F	X
Sun	F			X
Will	M	X
Wolfgang	M	X

Will is the aspiring son of a Polish Chicago cop and an all-American boy (unsurprisingly, spending much of Series 2 incapacitated and crying); Nomi walks into Californian loft conversions as if she’s very used to them, and is fluent in techspeak, so these are the two characters White American audiences are obviously supposed to relate to. Russian-German crime family bad boy Wolfgang and Icelandic druggie DJ Riley are their European equivalents. Spanish-Mexican Lito (Netflix has a huge market in Latin America) fulfils three functions: the White northern audiences can feel smug about their society being less homophobic than his; he turns all the orgies bisexual (or ‘pansexual’, as the kids will say); his battle for acceptance in family and society is convenient for Nomi to bandwaggon onto. Sun is a very cool Korean but, like the other characters of colour, her qualities (martial arts, emotional reserve, filial piety and big business) are stereotypical. So Indian Kala, likewise, spends her time shopping, feasting on curries and going to the Hindu temple. Kenyan Capheus (poor, dutiful son, battling to get HIV drugs) is more complex but the moment when that is revealed is when Nomi speaks through him.

And that is exactly my first problem with this otherwise highly-entertaining and lavish show. As well as the White characters having complex character traits not linked to their ethnicity, unlike the others, the globalist perspective feels more like colonialism. This isn’t only true in the writing. The very engaging Aml Ameen was replaced for Season 2 by Tony Onwumere, apparently because the former had ‘creative differences’ with the Wachowskis over the script. I can understand. While the first ‘get-together’ was stylish, the repetitions are not and the scene in the ocean shows there are much more creative ways of illustrating the joy of shared empathy. The portrayal of a White M-F middle-class American speaking through a poor Black Kenyan about courage and justice is chilling – especially when it often appears that Nomi (truncated Naomi for the anime-obsessed) is the mouthpiece for the Wachowskis. Sometimes this ventriloquism is very apparent indeed, as when a bisexual Black Kenyan woman states that she falls in love “with the person not the genitals” – a phrase infamously used by entryist White transvestites.

As for the topic itself. Non-local perception, usually categorised as clairvoyance, clairaudience and clairsentience, is not the quirky remit of fortune-tellers and Spiritualist mediums but has a body of rigorous research conducted and published by The Society for Psychical Research as well as various governments, including the US and (then) USSR, since the late 19^th century. More popularly, it is very familiar among rural traditional cultures (including my own where it is known as Second Sight) and anecdotal evidence demonstrates that many mothers, especially, have experienced unexplained knowledge of the emotional state of their children. The combination of all three abilities is unusual and the possession of another’s body is mentioned only in sinister cults. It is this combination of the familiar and the uncanny that I explore in my own series of mystery stories which have an empathetic protagonist in Bruno Benedetti.

My second problem is related to this topic. Empathy just isn’t like that. It’s not a closed circuit, and exclusive club. The empathetic heart opens to humanity and, yes, boundaries can certainly be a challenge and one can get emotionally overwhelmed but it’s not just some kind of embodied Zoom chat with designated participants. I’m not claiming to have the same ability as that portrayed in this series. Like many people, I’ve experienced a milder form of empathy and spoken to various audiences about these phenomena that I believe to be very common, though some people are more sensitive than others, but this kind of communal selfishness is unheard of.

My third problem is deeper. Anyone not still bewitched by mainstream media knows that the current global panic – with its massive profits for big tech, big data and big pharma – is planned to head toward the 4^th Industrial Revolution and a future of Human data-harvesting for AI, eugenicist population reduction, constant surveillance and cybernetic transhumanism. When Nomi & Co. speak disparagingly of our species, Homo Sapiens Sapiens, and hint that their, superior, species will inherit the Earth, I can’t help wondering if I’m really hearing the voice of the Wachowskis – talking about how their dream of transgender people controlling the means of human reproduction. And wiping out the competition more effectively than a meteor.  

Red-haired young woman with laptop and global data stream of text and images

Thanks to George Hodan for releasing his image Internet and Multimedia Sharing into the Public Domain.

Can Clan Alba Grasp This Thistle?

Alex Salmond, Tommy Sheridan and Alex Arthur are not known for timidity – and the 18 women and 11 other men standing for Scotland’s newest Independence party, Alba [pronounced AH-lih-pah], appear to be similarly courageous. They’ll have to be. Unionist and SNP diehard spite continually attempts to smear these three famous men, and other candidates, with the worst possible interpretation of their reported words and deeds – without so much as a mention of the ideological bias of that reporting or of the rebuttals those accused have publicly made.

Scotland’s parliamentary elections (for MSPs to Holyrood, not MPs to Westminster) use a Single Transferable Vote system that mixes ‘First Past the Post’ for the Constituency with the D’Hondt or Jefferson method of Proportional Representation for the List/ Regional votes. I support Alba, with one major misgiving, but I don’t think I’m going to be voting for them on the List. I don’t think I’m going to be voting SNP in my Constituency, either. So I don’t think I’ll be following either of the voting strategies recommended by a party I (mostly) admire. Why?

Firstly, the Scottish context. Alba is largely a breakaway from the Scottish National Party although others for Independence who were not SNP supporters have also joined. Alba is only standing on the List which means that (apart from in 1 out of 8 regions) it’s not threatening SNP seats in Holyrood. The break happened for 3 main reasons:

1. SNP-dominated Scots Government has failed to protect women and children from unbalanced (and therefore illegal under the UK Equality Act 2010) impacts from the policy capture of transgender self-identity as well as from threats of violence online and in person, mostly from male transvestites against gender-critical women. 
2. Senior SNP figures appear to have been associated with grave miscarriage of justice in the trial of Alex Salmond (for various offences for which the verdict was either ‘not guilty’ or ‘not proven’).
3. There is some suspicion that the SNP senior management is too comfortable in a devolved government role and that a fresh impulse is needed for Independence.

Secondly, the global context. Point 1 above refers to the policy of gender self-identification pushed by the SNP (and other parties) in Scotland and many Alba supporters are vociferous in their opposition – while clear that they are not ‘transphobic’. However most of these, and most of the gender-critical women and men I interact with on Twitter, fail to make the connection between this lucrative Big Pharma policy (so detrimental to women and risky to children) and others. I think there are 3 reasons for this failure:

1. Much of the gender-critical discourse originates in the UK among leftwing women, many lesbian, already well-known for their support of women’s and children’s rights either in academia or in social work/ politics/ community group settings. In contrast, much of the critique of other Big Pharma policy has recently been loudly trumpeted (with its connections generally misunderstood) by rightwing American White men.
2. Despite the iatrogenic harms of its promotion of Thalidomide, DDT, AZT, and other medical scandals, Big Pharma has gained a place in the hearts and minds of leftwing carers and activists over the last four decades due to its absorption into the pill-popping market (previously dominated by White women and the White elderly) of a new demographic of customers: younger gay men, of all ethnicities, mostly in the post-industrialised global north. Recently it has made strenuous efforts to extend that ageing and always-growing market to heterosexual men and to the global south.
3. Women speaking in public have been subject to censure for millennia and, anecdotal evidence suggests that the experience of women and men (online or in person) opposing an established discourse is very different in terms of the abuse each sex receives. Therefore women may be, understandably, reluctant to even consider the merits of yet another controversial position that may gain them nothing but more derision. To gay men, and their allies, it is simply unthinkable that ‘HIV causes AIDS and only pills will save us’ is a credo unworthy of belief. Or that even one of the ‘co-discoverers’ of ‘the AIDS virus’ doesn’t believe it.

Right now, globally, there is a concerted, long-planned, attempt to take over the means of democracy for the ends of three inter-connected interest groups who have been attempting to set up elite stakeholder capitalist global governance for at least a century: Big Pharma, Big Data and Big Philanthropy. The Covid-19 phenomena are not only fortuitous for this attempt, they are its implementation.

The inability of the Left to put together the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle (all freely available) means that anyone seeing the big picture is instantly shut down as a nutcase. The mental and emotional labour of reconsidering the ideological basis of one’s cherished identity politics is exhausting and very few are prepared to invest the necessary time or energy. In fairness, the plethora of apparent nutcases (some of whom are agents of the US Operation Mockingbird and others of the UK 77^th propaganda brigade) who mix real concerns over Nuremberg Code violations with the delusions of the Flat Earth Society, do not help in providing a clear critique of this New World Order agenda which is variously named.

However, just as gender-critical protest gradually gained consideration and approval, resulting in at least a temporary halt in policy creep, so too there is a groundsurge of concern as one-by-one the predictions of responsible independent investigative journalists (such as Whitney Webb) keep coming true.

With widespread iatrogenic harms, as even a vaccine proponent admits, and the denial of human rights (based on flawed data and inadequate legal provision) already happening in Scotland, my priority must be to support a party that opposes the insidious agenda of the Gates Foundation, the World Economic Forum and the military-industrial complex that together planned this global take-over prepared for in role-play many times.

In other words, unless the Alba party wakes up and takes back the chilling words of Alex Salmond, who apparently wants masks indoors and out [1], despite my disdain for single-issue politics and my lifelong support for Scottish independence, my list vote is going to the Freedom Alliance party and my constituency vote to the least globalist among the unionists. I am not alone in my concerns. Many of us who were politically homeless over gender politics are now (somewhat) politically homeless over medical tyranny.

Grasp this thistle, Clan Alba. Tak tent. Take heed. Saor Alba a-nis. Free Scotland now. From all our enemies.

Bee pollinating purple flower of one green spiky thistle among many.

[1] This point he stated in a video for the Alba Party I watched but I can’t find it online now. The reference is to a newspaper article showing his general credulous and belligerent attitude to Covid-19, though Vitamin D in Scotland is maybe not a bad idea!

Thanks to Robert Lynch for releasing his photo “Bee Pollinating Thistle” into the public domain.