I want to welcome you all to our second last Wednesday lunchtime seminar series of the School of Security Studies for this term. Today, I'm very pleased to welcome Dr. Jesse Cransever, live in the wee hours of the morning in the United States joining us. And he'll be talking today about his research arising from his forthcoming book. The research today titled, Fetishizing the Tactical, How Cultural Practices, Policies, and Politics Converge in US Militarization, provides a broad general overview for his theoretical empirical arguments within his book. Written in a narrative form, the presentation traces the development of a post-Vietnam contestation over the meaning of professionalism in US military organizations, one that made special forces and a mythology around the capabilities of commandos central. Dr. Jesse Cransever traces this mythology through the war on drugs, black ops, military security assistance, and professional development operations, which brought US weapons, uniforms, tactics, and cultural practices with them to those countries being developed. Love the air quotes. And finally, the period of neoliberal privatization, which saw a global and privatized form of militarism and US military culture being promoted. The result of this historical and political processes in the US popular culture, in that US popular culture adopted what he calls a commando fetish. That is a non-rational erotically charged investment in a particular imaginary of special forces. He traces his fetishization of tactical capabilities into US culture, foreign policy, and current debates about military activity, police killings, and self-defense in the context of racialized threat perception. Dr. Cransever hopes to be a, in resisting hegemony, a major of his own design from Ithaca College and a PhD in international relations from American University. He is currently a visiting research fellow here in the Department of War Studies at King's College, London, and previously served as an assistant professor of political science at the University of the District of Columbia and a teaching assistant professor at North Carolina State University. He has also held postdocs at BIG SSS in Bremen, Germany and at North Carolina State University. His recent work has contributed to critical security studies, particularly in theorizing embodiment and desire in militarized cultures and institutions. He is currently completing his book, Fetishizing the Tactical, which traces the history and diffusion of depoliticized tactical training in the US military into US society and around the world with the goal of understanding the social-cultural basis of permanent, unwinnable wars and their racialized and gendered effects. His work has been published in a number of journals, including international political sociology, critical military studies, critical studies on security, and the International Feminist Journal of Politics. And he has also presented at conferences around the world, most recently in Vienna, Cuito and Toronto. Dr. Jessie Crane-Sieber is joined today by our very own Dr. Aggy Hearst, a senior lecturer in war studies. As she will act as his discussant today, Dr. Hearst's research is situated in the fields of international political theory and critical military studies. She is a principal investigator on the Leverhulme Trust in British Academy-funded research projects exploring the US military use of war games and simulations for teaching and training purposes. She is currently writing her second book, The Politics of Play, War Gaming with the US Military, which explores the phenomena of play and immersion, arguing that the flow state generated by gaming is being used to instill doctrine and cultivate mental and physical muscle memory in service members. She has recently published articles with review of international studies, critical military studies on play and war gaming renaissance. So I am very pleased to have such an awesome lineup here today of the speaker and discussant. As the usual format, what I will do is I will hand the floor over to Jesse and he's going to be sharing some slides with us today. Jesse will talk for about 20 minutes for which then Aggie will offer some discussion reflections and then the floor is open to you, the audience. You can either zoom raise your hand to ask it live or you can type in the chat box if you have any questions that I can read out to Jesse at that point. So again, I'll remind you if you have not already done so to mute your mic, but please feel free to turn your camera on so we can see your lovely faces as Jesse talks. So without further ado, Jesse, I'll hand the floor over to you. Right. Well, thank you all for being here. It's lovely that you chose to spend your lunch with me. I'm excited to share my work in progress. As Amanda mentioned, this is an overview of a really big project, right? So I'm not presenting a short, discreet article. So I just wanted to intimate at the very beginning that there are things I will touch on that I'm happy to explain more of, but I'm necessarily trying to cover a good amount of territory in a short amount of time. So hopefully it all makes lots of sense to you and you all love it, but I look forward to your critiques nonetheless. So I'm gonna start at PowerPoint and I hope you will enjoy. Here we go. So my title, fetishizing the tactical is the title of my new book that is a work in progress. And I'm gonna walk you through basic argument here. So the basic outline of my talk today, number one, I wanna talk about the context of permanent war and how the U.S. solved the problem of maintaining a permanent warfare state, how it solved it culturally. I'm gonna then theorize briefly what I call a widely held social fetish and why I think that's a useful analytical framework for understanding what I'm talking about. And finally, I'm looking forward to all of your fantastic questions and comments and insights and critiques. So that's the basic plan. Here we go. So the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King in his famous 1967 Beyond Vietnam speech referred to the United States as the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today. I would argue that that is still true. There are lots of ways we might interpret that statement, but the U.S. is hands down the largest exporter of weapons, the largest purchaser of weapons, the largest manufacturer of weapons. We have the largest military budget and we also have the largest military footprint with U.S. combat, U.S. assistance troops in over a hundred nations, 20 alone in Africa, special forces are currently deployed in over 80 nations. So it really is there is an indispensable role for the U.S. military and the U.S. military culture in particular in articulating a vision of what is a soldier, what does a soldier look like, what do they do? One thing I do have to say at the beginning, and it makes me uncomfortable to say it, but I'm gonna say it anyway, President Trump deserves credit because he is the first president in my entire lifetime to not increase the scale of U.S. foreign wars and to not initiate any new U.S. foreign wars. That doesn't mean I'm a huge fan of his military policy in particular, his abandonment of the Kurds and a variety of other policies he chose to pursue are disastrous. But it's worth noting that he really is in over 40 years, the first U.S. president not to sizeably increase foreign military footprints. And it's worth noting. So the question I start with in the book is how did U.S. populations come to accept the permanent warfare state? And my dissertation, I studied U.S. combat forces in Iraq, largely using audiovisual materials produced by troops themselves. So YouTube, military.com and other uploads like that as well as documentary films. And I supplemented it with ethnographic work with U.S. troops on bases and their families, interviews, secondary data, whatever I could find. And broadly speaking, I've conceived of the combat unit as an interactive gendered social performance. So sort of picking up where Butler talks about performativity and the way that we sort of perform roles, we perform ourselves into existence. So our identities are not something that comes prior to our activities or rather our identities emerge from the stabilization of repeated activity. Well, arguably that's what a combat unit is. It's repeated activity, repeated coordination that produces our performative self. So this is what I've been working on for quite a long time. And as you'll see, my thinking has evolved but I've all along been trying to understand the sort of how possible questions behind permanent warfare. So the goal of this book is to tell a story, not particularly the story of how the U.S. came to be so violent, arguably the history of settler colonialism and the legacy of other colonial artifices plays a huge role. Other people have done a great job of covering this. So my book does not tell the story of how the U.S. became so violent, but really what I'm trying to focus on is how do we come to celebrate and glorify violence, military violence in a particular way that is conducive to permanent unwinnable wars. And in particular, I focus on the glorification of a sort of heroic professional commando who can walk into any trap and defeat any enemy. Just again for basic context, just a couple of years ago Raymond Thomas, then the chief of U.S. Special Forces Command, talked about the fact that there were 8,000 special forces troops deployed in over 80 countries. There was not a significant political debate about one of those deployments, not one. So what I'm fascinated by is the creation of both institutional and cultural conditions of possibility for U.S. presidents and their administrations to pursue essentially the permanent warfare state. So where did this all come from? And my narrative begins with a gentleman named Marshall and the problem he invented. If you're not familiar with SLA Marshall, he wrote a book in 1947 called Men Against Fire, which famously claimed that less than 25% of U.S. infantry troops in World War II fired their weapons at the enemy. His data is bunk, just flat out. His data is bunk, it's no good. As much as I'm a huge fan of participatory, open-ended qualitative research, that's what he did. And yet he then specified statistics on that basis, which really doesn't make much sense if you know anything about methodology, right? You don't hold some focus groups and then come up with statistical answers, but that's what he did. And the impact of his work is not so much like methodological genius so much as it's a set of political implications because his data created the framework that military psychology used to imbricate itself into the military industrial complex and into the sort of ever-increasing science of military training, military psychology, military preparedness. So over the course of subsequent studies, some by people who are a big fan of Marshall, some by people who are very critical of him, nonetheless they showed much higher percentages of U.S. troops in Korea and Vietnam did engage in direct fire. So that provided then evidence to reinforce the military psychologist claims that they were having a positive impact, right? I would just note that despite the fact that the United States dropped more bombs in Korea than all of the combatants in all of World War II. And we dropped more bombs in Vietnam than we did in Korea. We lost both wars nonetheless, right? North Korea is a nuclear-armed dictatorship to this day. Vietnam is a united country under a nationalist government and the leadership of the Communist Party after the collapse of the U.S.-backed dictatorship in the South. So despite the incredible levels of violence we were able to inflict, despite evidence showing that our troops were in fact engaging in combat operations, we lost. So what happens after Vietnam is that the United States really goes through an identity crisis. And the question of how do we reform our military after the Vietnamese debacle was front and center throughout the 1970s. So the entire system was redesigned. The United States scrapped its conscription system, moved to an all-volunteer military. This included, of course, a massive increase in recruitment efforts in advertising budgets, cooperation with Hollywood and television producers to glorify military service. And as I'll discuss a little bit more detail, long-term and mutually reinforcing linkages between the U.S. military establishment and law enforcement. So in this sort of identity crisis, Ronald Reagan emerges as this really key figure. So the massive military deficit-based military funding of the 1980s permitted the war on the, sorry, the U.S. military to really reimagine itself. And they went with it for it with gusto. And what I would argue is underappreciated by scholars of the military is the particular role of the war on drugs in both legitimating the Reagan era buildup and in making it what it was. So despite a Soviet-focused cruise missiles in Europe, new aircraft combat systems, new stealth technology, all of that, a rather substantial part of the U.S. military budget went to assistance to police forces, border forces, and other security forces under the rubric of the war on drugs. But I think the most important thing that happened in this sort of transition period around the end of Vietnam and the birth of Reaganism was the development by the Los Angeles Police Department of the SWAT team. SWAT, for those of you who are not familiar, stands for Special Weapons and Tactics. It was designed to be a hostage rescue force that would sort of be able to do forced breach operation. So if I was holding hostages at gunpoint, the SWAT team would be able to position snipers and batter down the door and busted and shoot me before I could cause any trouble, right? But SWAT teams have now become ubiquitous in American society to the point where the average city of 10,000 has a SWAT team. And the smallest that I'm aware of is there's a county in Maine that has less than 1,000 people but has a SWAT team. So the proliferation of these paramilitary forces, in particular in the 1980s, is to me a really key part of the story I'm telling here. That goes hand in hand with military buildup. So what developed out of this era, in particular out of the SWAT teams and their preparations, their training, sorry, my dog is being weird. Hopefully he'll be quiet. Is there was the development of tactical scenario-based training. So traditionally troops were taught to fire their weapon at a target. The target was human-ish looking. But what we get in scenario-based training is realistic looking targets in what's called CQB or close quarters battles, which means no longer shooting at a distant target for accuracy, but instead making split second decisions about who is to be killed and who is not to be killed upon entering a space. So in particular, if you've ever seen the movie Men in Black, it's a silly science fiction film but there's a great scene where Will Smith's character is presented with a whole bunch of aliens and a little girl and he ends up shooting the little girl because as he notes, one alien's just doing push-ups and now there's out for a jog and now there's got his shopping but the little girl's reading nuclear physics books. She's up to trouble. So the character of Will Smith in that scene shows the sort of psychology of the CQB training model which is bust into a space and immediately assess who is to live and who is to die. So like for example, the photo on the right is a target eye shot at a local range. It's one of the ones they sell in order to really, it's not about just hitting the center mass of the target, it's about having a discrimination. So the centrality of special forces, I would argue, comes because they are put at front and center of new training regimes. So former US special forces are now training SWAT teams. They are, the Israeli sort of complex of training was really important to this as well as US special forces and they trained police all over the country and through the war on drugs, not just all over the United States but throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. So border forces, different police forces, different national security forces were all trained under these rubrics and they were trained in these techniques.  There's a standardization throughout the 80s and 90s of what security forces around the world look like as US mass produced and mass distributed equipment becomes available. Left is a photo my sweetheart took at Black Lives Matter demonstration just this last spring. And these people are not wearing insignia, you'll notice. This has been a major problem over the last year in the United States. We've had security forces across the country wearing what seems to be surplus military gear but without identifying insignia telling us what unit or branch they're in. Some of them are law enforcement which of course is a breach of Casa Comitatis and all of that. But that's a much bigger story that other people have told, but it's worth highlighting. Just to give a sense, there's been one really good statistical analysis of the militarization of police through the 1033 assistance program by which the United States military gives surplus military equipment and the part we never talk about training to police around the country. You can read through the quote here from Delhante at all. But what they find is that the training that comes with the 1033 program is positively correlated with the killing of civilians. And this is if you hold constant the level of killings before they came, right? So last year we might say, well, that equipment goes to the most dangerous areas, not quite because they also use the puppy side database which is horrifying for all of us who love animals. And for some reason, this seems to get through to people in a way that Black Lives Matter claims don't. So when we talk about the number of dark skinned people killed by police in the United States, it tends not to resonate as much. But every time I show people the puppy side database, it really seems to hit my students. Puppy side database tracks the police shooting of pets during the course of raids. In my dissertation, I analyzed, this was in 2008, a mayor of a small town in Virginia, his wife had purchased marijuana by mail and they served a no knock raid with the SWAT team. They broke down the door, shot her two pit bulls and handcuffed her to a radiator in a pool of her dog's blood. And this was the mayor's wife. So if that's how she's treated, we can then understand how the killing of, for example, Breonna Taylor and so many other racialized minorities who are seen as dangerous, how that becomes possible. So just to go back to the Delhante et al study, they actually statistically controlled for violence before and after the training program. And it really is clear, the 1033 program is correlated with police killing more humans and pets. So what we have then is an image of US cities, especially those with diverse non-white populations that's constructed particularly by law and order politicians and their allies and the police unions. We have a construction of our cities as places that are at war zones, constant bloodshed, people just shooting each other in the street. And in this framing, police are then not instigating violence. They're going to a violent place. Sort of like the same way we talk in US culture a lot about how we deploy our troops to war zones. We never admit that we invaded someone, but there was no war zone until our troops got there and started blowing things up. But we talk about war zones as a sort of spatial construction that then our boys are sent into. And of course we want them to have the best equipment. Of course we want them to have the best training because they're going to such dangerous places. Well, what I would argue is the same framing takes place whether it's a third world space that has been targeted for sort of imperial policy or whether it is a US city which themselves have been racialized and made to look dangerous. And what you can see, these are magazines targeting the police tactical community. This is not your friendly neighborhood officer friendly. As we can see, this militarization of policing has had a great deal of visibility given the recent demonstrations for Black Lives Matter and the overwhelmingly ridiculous response that a lot of folks have run into. So here is the Ferguson protests that sort of launched the current wave of Black Lives Matter demonstrations around the country and the response to a photographer with his hands up, right? Tells us everything. These are various police forces assembled to confront the standing rock water demonstrators who were protesting the building of an oil pipeline across both sacred and ecologically sensitive land. And they were met with an overwhelmingly militarized response despite the fact that they never engaged in a single case of documented provocative violence. They weren't throwing things, they weren't, no, but this is what they were met with. So when we think about how the commando training and sort of tactical thinking has been exported, one of the things the war on drugs did is it very helpfully allowed the Reagan administration to sidestep the political questions of support to non-democratic regimes, particularly in Latin America and the Caribbean. So it's not that we're holding up a dictator, it's that we're helping his police forces professionalize to confront the cartels. But what professionalization has really meant a lot of the time has been tactical scenario training. So it has not been training in civil rights, it has not been training in conflict avoidance or violence mitigation or mental health or confronting drug addiction. No, it's been none of that, right? What's really been pushed by the US for basically my whole lifetime when we offer assistance has been increasing the sort of tactical capacities of forces. As many people have studied, in particular, I really like Rachel Maddow's book, it's popular but really easy to read, Drift. It tells the story in particular of how Dick Cheney as a central character but others associated with him, they were all sort of holdovers from the Ford administration who experienced what they saw as the humiliation of the limitation of presidential power by Democrats after Vietnam. And they've spent a lot of years trying to rebuild the power of the presidency. And they did that in particular through privatization of military contracting so that more US troops could be deployed in more places with less impact on our general society. And I'm just gonna speed up real quick because there's a couple of things I wanna show. This graphic is too small for you to see but I strongly recommend it. It shows what the flow of military equipment is on the left side and who it goes to by state on the right. This largest category right here which is $743 million worth of equipment, that's for mine resistant armored personnel carriers. So when we ask why it is that even as US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2008, 2009 are complaining about the lack of protective equipment, some of that very protective equipment is being issued to sheriff's departments around the United States. So it's a fascinating. The commando fetish has not just gone through our military and our police forces, it's also very much impacted domestic life. You can see that in the transformation of gun sales over the last 20 years, an emphasis on military style weapons has become much bigger. There have been, of course, there's a whole cottage industry now catering to people like me, private citizens who like to play with guns and pretend we're commandos. So there's paintball, right? Which is the sport made out of tactical scenario training. But there are also home defense tactical courses you can take to practice confronting a violent intruder in your own home. And to be clear about, for example, making sure you don't shoot through walls to kill your own children because one of the problems of modern firearms and construction in the United States is that we build everything out of wallboard and our bullets will go right through our home into our neighbor's homes. So there's a whole industry catering to private gun owners and we know that over 17 million guns have been sold in the United States just in 2020. The vast majority of those going to a small number of people so the average gun owner, I think the last statistic I saw, don't quote me on this because I don't have it in front of me, but the last statistic I saw, so the average gun owner owned more than eight guns. So even though we have more firearms than people in the United States, a very small minority of homes actually contain almost all of those guns. But the fetishization isn't just in terms of actual weapons. I would argue it's also cultural, right? And it affects how children play, it affects video games, it affects Hollywood, it affects television. And what we have, I would argue, is a fetishization of tactical scenarios and the masculinized personas who we assume inhabit them. A quick reminder for those of you who may have forgotten in 2016, a group of militiamen took over an Oregon wildlife station, looked like this is a photo of them at the time. They were all found innocent by a jury when they were charged because, in the words of their lawyer, for these defendants and these people, having a firearm has nothing to do with a threat or anything else, he said, it's just as much a statement of their rural culture as a cowboy hat or a pair of jeans. I think the jury believed at the end of the day that that's why the guns were there. So they were found innocent of threatening federal officials, they were found innocent of intimidation. Instead, let me look at them, that is not a cowboy, right? That is someone taking on the persona of that I'm trying to highlight, right? The fetishized commando. So compare them to Tamir Rice, a 12 year old killed less than 30 seconds after the police showed up after a report of a young man with a gun. He had a pellet gun, a toy gun in a park in Ohio. Mind you, if he had been an adult and that had been a long gun, he would have been perfectly within his rights to carry it. In Ohio, you can carry a firearm wherever you like. So the fact that police shot him less than 30 seconds after arrival tells us everything about threat perception.  So when we think about the capacity to dominate a tactical space to defend your family, to defend yourself, what we never really mentioned is how racialized threat perception is and how important it is that who is allowed to defend themselves is also based on who is seen as scary. This is a meme from South America today about going out to buy bread under corona. So even though he is not carrying any weapons, he's got an awful lot of hand sanitizer. I think it nonetheless shows that we have a globally distributed fetish around commandos. So just a few very quick words by way of wrapping up about what I mean by a fetish. So there are several uses of the term we might be familiar with.  There's of course the psychiatric or the DSM articulation of what a fetish is and then what we mean by popular. So real quick, Marx talks about fetishism. This fetishism of commodities is the operation by which commodities appear to have independent life and the conditions of their production disappear. Outside of classical Marxism, fetishism is often talked about in psychiatric terms around partialism or fetishization of objects, right? Which is an unusual sexual desire. Of course we know that sexual desire and usual and normal are really problematic forms of governmentality, not actual things that exist. But nonetheless we get our modern sense of what a fetish is largely from psychiatry. But I wanna recover what I would argue is a synthesis of these two terms. So when I talk about a fetishism, I want to talk about both an object whose conditions of production have been made invisible meaning the invincible American command and the quasi erotic attachments to that. I wanna show just a couple of really great pictures. I know I'm running low on time. So if you'll pardon me, I'm gonna click through real quick. But the other example I would give for the way I use the word fetish is the way that our culture also fetishizes youth. So when we fetishize youth, I'm not saying every single individual has a fetish for children, but what we have as a society is a youth fetish. And that's what feeds the cosmetic industry, the cosmetic surgery industry, the creepy relationships between old men and young girls, all and all of the various pornographization of youth. So when I say there's a commando fetish, I mean similar to the fact that we have a youth fetish, that we have a cultural imaginary that has grown disproportionately powerful and whose conditions of possibility we've lost sight of or conditions of production we've lost sight of. And of course, then there's actual fetishization, right? There's actual just flat out fetishes, right?  But ultimately what I really believe is that this fetishization of tactical scenario training of the commandos who dominate a battle space has been really important to the militarization of policing and to the permanent warfare state. And I will stop there. Thank you so much. Great. Thank you so much, Dr. Karim Siba. What a brilliant overview of this very exciting book project. Delighted to have been invited to comment. It's always a kind of rare treat, especially at this late stage in the term, to read something about which one objects very little and which is so beautifully written that it kind of sparks off brain tingles even as one sign ups is a kind of all but failing. So thank you to Jesse for sending me through the written version of this previously so that I could read some of the detail in addition to presenting today. I've tried to condense my thoughts and my provocations down to kind of five questions but each question has between three and seven sub questions. So I won't ask them all. I will just try and plow through. I'll do them all at once and then leave space for other folks to come in and pose questions before Dr. Karim Siba responds perhaps. So the first thing I wanted to ask was how does your analysis of this commando figure and our fetishization thereof sit amongst the other kind of research in IR and beyond currently looking at war fighters and veterans. I'm thinking of people like Ken McLeish and Zoe Will but also other folks in fact on this call as well. And the reason I ask is that I find it interesting and I'd like to ask you about your sense of how successful or complete or final is this kind of process of interpolation into the professional commando figure? As a corollary, what kinds of leakages or fractures or resistances are discernible? And what does this mean for your analysis? I asked this in part because in the written version you sent me, you talked about the kind of commando figure rampaging on their various adventures and you used the line that they don't worry about what they broke or who they hurt. But of course, some of the studies that are out currently on war fighters and veterans precisely kind of interrogate the after effects and the ways in which those violences are kind of enforced and re-inflicted both on the subject themselves as well as of course on the objects of those violence. So what does that incompleteness or completeness of that interpolation process mean for our fetishization as well? Does it drive it or is it somehow kind of intention with it? That's cluster of questions number one. I was very interested in this question of what you're pointing to about what can be legitimized under this guise of professionalism? And it got me thinking about a whole host of other things both within the academy and broadly that we're guilty of this language of it's just business. I was watching, I don't know what it was the other day on Telly, I think it was Deadwood that Timothy Olyphant series season from about 10, 15 years ago. And there's all of this conversation about it's been set in the wild west in their own sorts of murders and violent acts but all kind of rationalized through the lens of it's just business. And I wondered also about the it's just business logic of the convergence between military and the discipline of psychology that you also alluded to in your presentation which has also cropped up in my own work. Of course, there's a very long history of DOD funding for psychology from the early 20th century and before which had to do also with all sorts of funds of racialized testing and racialized studies that set limits on things like immigration and of course compromises that they do no harm commitment right up to and including their involvement in Guantanamo Bay and so forth. So I just got, it got me kind of thinking about this this more wide ranging legitimization of things we do through this language of professionalism and how that might strengthen or at least provide other context for your claims there. I suppose most obviously I'd love to hear your thoughts about kind of what is it in particular that has so gripped us culturally, psychologically, erotically about the Commando figure? What is the hook? What floats people's boats figuratively and practically in many cases too? And also again to link it to my own work a little bit how do these questions of paintball, airsoft, military fitness, video games how do fun recreation and pleasure come into this? What is the kind of the release or the payoff that kind of goes on in your estimation? I wanted to ask about the reception of your work around these questions fetishism, eroticism, your piece which I think is fabulous from 2015 on sexy warriors and what's been the response? Have you faced any of the traditional boundary policing where the disciplinary IR likes to inflict on its more imaginative members? And how have you managed that as you've plowed on forward? And finally on this question of fetish itself and the Marxian framing of commodity fetishism, fetishism which I could say that properly and have you linked that very effectively to the question of the kind of global political economy of violence? I really like the way you kind of summarized the idea of that into a secular mysticism. And I was wondering how that squares with the kind of professional military self-image of this highly rational, highly calculated, highly kind of routinized series of practices and dispositions. It seems a kind of odd connection in some ways to have this mystical kind of extraordinary sort of affective power coupled with this apparently very disciplinary, very rigid, very routinized series of corollaries. I did have some other thoughts about the difference between your, you talk about the difference in the written paper at least, between the intersubjective and subjective phenomenological framings that you draw between the Marxian and the psychoanalytical psychological framings. But I was wondering just as a final thought, where this is situated in terms of the sort of Marxian versus social constructionist or constructivist debates. There's some hallmarks of this that have a kind of Frankfurt style, Frankfurt school style kind of feel to them. But how does that also then sit with the world? What's the connection there with your more sort of social constructivist commitments that seem also to come through?  Great paper and a pleasure to engage with. So thanks. Thank you so much, Aggie. Fascinating set of questions. I will do my best to address them pretty quickly because I would love to hear from everyone else as well. Some of these I'm gonna need to think about more than I am going to be able to at this moment. The first question I think is really spot on the question of like, well, if these badass commandos are so badass, why do they fall apart when they come home? And that's actually not unrelated. I have an essay I'm working on. Hopefully we'll be out next year called Why Imperial Bureaucracies Require Broken Men. In which I argue that the social conditions of recruitment require social fracturing in the United States, the lack of a welfare state, the prison industrial complex, arguably even the lack of access to abortion services and contraception. I know so many people who joined the military straight out of high school because their girlfriends were pregnant and there was nowhere else to go. So the social conditions of fracturing that drive recruitment, but that's different from the question you're getting at, which is like, so if these guys are so authoritative, what happens when they come home? And what I would argue is that the goal of the training is not to create a subject who is impervious to psychological pain, but it's to create a subject who can engage in coordinated unit-based violence at the time when they're terrified, adrenaline kicked in, they're deployed. And the military has not historically carried a great deal about what the costs are when you come home. There's a new, new meaning the last 10, 15 years initiative like Warrior Mind, right? There's all of these various programs run by the US DoD designed to sort of psychologically safeguard the soldier because this generation of combatants has seen more deployments. One of my former students of Special Forces based at Fort Bragg when I was in North Carolina, he served six deployments in 10 years in mostly Iraq and Afghanistan in a few places he couldn't talk about. So this emphasis on psychological fitness is more important for someone like him than it used to be in a conscript based army where you might serve your year and a half and then you're out, right? What I would argue is that the training does its job in producing the violence it's supposed to produce at the time, but that none of that necessarily sticks with you. So you can be absolutely traumatized by having done your job perfectly. You did exactly what you were trained to do. That doesn't mean it won't have severe consequences down the road, which we know are strongly associated with suicide, alcohol abuse, spousal abuse, divorce, right? Relationship collapse of various sorts. There's all sorts of psychological and social implications for the folks who are deployed. But I don't think that invalidate, right? I don't think the psychological harm of coming home invalidates the effectiveness of the training and vice versa, right? The training is very effective. It gets them to do what they're supposed to do.  They have to sit with it for the rest of their lives but there's no contradiction there except that military psychologists assert that there should be, right? Because they assert that the professional forces should be impervious to mental pain. Although there is actually a really interesting study by Israelis that found that their snipers had the lowest levels of PTSD, which is fascinating because snipers know the names of their targets. They often watch them with their families for days on end before pulling the trigger. And what they found is that the snipers in Israeli sort of elite units had very, very low levels of psychological distress partially because they knew who their target was and they were sure that it was a bad guy in a way that the sort of firing a 40 millimeter grenade launcher into a crowd when the crowd shoots at you you have no idea who you're killing, right? And that traumatizes. So that's I think what I'll say about that for now. Quickly, what can be legitimated under the guise of professionalism? Good God, everything. Anything and everything apparently can be considered professionalization because depending on who's deploying the rhetoric it's used to serve different agendas, right? So there's a variety of different material agendas that are served by the professionalization discourse in the US military, right? So there are defense contractors but then there's all these training institutes and then there's all these ex generals who are lobbyists and each of them use the word professional to mean my clients need to be paid by you to help you do the thing, right? Whatever that thing might be. So, but psychology has for a long time been accused of a normalization bias, right? That the goal of psychology is to help people integrate into the society as it is, right? So psychologists in the 50s and 60s were telling women that if they were in an unpleasant orgasm-less, loveless marriage that they should be taking the right kind of pills so that they can be good mothers, right? There was nothing about helping these people achieve the kind of lives they wanna have. So psychology has always had a bias towards adjusting the person to the social condition not adjusting the social condition towards something we might call humanity, right? But military psychology as you flagged I think is really helpful has been directly implicated in the torture programs first at Guantanamo Bay and then under General Miller when he was deployed to Iraq he brought all of those programs designed by psychologists for Guantanamo he brought them to Iraq where they slipped out of control, out of special forces and we end up with Private Lindy England of the National Guard being the only person charged for the Abu Ghraib, right? Well, sorry, the only person convicted of a felony Sergeant Graves was also charged, her sergeant. No officers were charged for any of the abuse and torture that happened Abu Ghraib despite the fact that it was designed by psychologists. The last thing I wanna come to is the question of the sort of Marx versus constructivism which to me fits into the question of the other question which is what has gripped us about the commando figure? So I'm unusual in that I didn't encounter social constructivism until I had already read lots and lots and lots of Marx and feminism and I was like, oh, I guess that's me I guess that's what I'm supposed to be because Wittgenstein is right about a lot of things so I guess I'm a constructivist. I've long struggled with the dichotomy among my friends. People who particularly are educated in Europe have a very particular view of the material versus social debate and Marx being on the wrong side of it. And it's something that at least in my education grounded in sort of post-colonial Marxism that was never a thing like that. What do you mean? What do you mean? Marx is a social constructivist. He's the original social constructivist. He's the one who showed us how constructed everything is, even money itself even our bodies themselves, even nature itself, right? That's what his PhD dissertation was about, right? It's the human relationship with nature and how we construct it both physically and ideologically. So that debate is one that has always confused me and I think I'm either not smart enough to understand it or just was in the wrong milieu to be a partisan on it. Because what I see, what Marx's argument about the commodity is very, very similar to for example, Schotter's argument, if you, he's someone Patrick Jackson cites a great deal, who's a communications theorist. He talks about what he calls counterfeit narratives. So the world is made of narratives. Of course, everything is a story but some stories are designed to rob us. One of those, he argues is money, right? Labor creates all wealth, human work has created all the wealth that exists on the planet. And yet we've been lied to, we have this story that says some people get to own almost everything and the rest of us don't get to have much. So at least for me, the distinction between the Marxist impulse and the sort of constructivist impulse doesn't trouble me as much because they're both sort of sidelines here in the US of empire. So in particular, the reason they come together for me and the figure of the commando is that the commando figure is, the reason it has such a grip on us is it fulfills so many different needs at the same time, right? So it produces secular superheroes. It gives us the ability to have a great deal of really fun storytelling.  Whether they are ninjas or commandos or superheroes or whatever, there's a way that the commando gives us a secular superhero that maybe don't need magical powers because their training is so bad. In particular, I think the reason it has such a grip on us though is that the Reagan 80s filled our society here in the US and through our media production, all of you, everybody everywhere, with images of bad-ass commando soldiers, bad-ass commando warriors, and that was the sort of media context. So there's great work by, for example, Jeffords and some others, right, on the sort of cultural imaginary of the Reagan 80s and how it remilitarized as a way of responding to the humiliation of Vietnam. So when you think about the political agenda of the Reaganism, when you think about the remasculinization efforts of the right wing in particular after the perceived humiliation of Vietnam, when you think about all of that, I think that the reason that the commando figure is so gripping is that it meets sort of what we might call both Marxist and social constructivist needs. It gives us a material figure to organize production and consumption around and it also gives us an imaginary that we can invest ourselves in psychologically and erotically. Well, I am enjoying this conversation with I need another cup or I need another refill. Just for everyone, I know if you need to go great, but please stay on because this is my own personal Zoom account and I'm enjoying the conversation. So I'm willing to let it rock on. We've got questions for you, Jesse, from Catherine and Chris. So I'll let you ask them both one after the other and then Jesse, you can respond to them. Cool, so Catherine, go ahead. Okay, I mean, thank you so much for that. Like Hagi, I've got probably a lot of questions. I'll try and keep them as kind of short as possible. I mean, the first one, which I would have asked, you know, you answered at the end, which is how to this, you know, the Marxist sense of fetish and the sort of the BDSM sense of fetish as well as the kind of psychiatric link into each other in your theorizing. So kind of thank you for anticipating that question. So kind of the next stage of that then is, you know, maybe how does this theorization of fetish, how can it then respond to, you know, the sort of colonial context, you know, what anthropologists were thinking when, you know, they were using the idea of fetish sort of in the first place, you know, because I think that's kind of in the, you know, that's in the background as well, you know, with the whole psychiatric, you know, and the Marxist tradition. The second thing I'm really interested in and, you know, maybe the book's going to go into this is what's actually happening in the training, you know, in a sort of everyday embodied way. How are they, you know, how's the training being designed and experienced?  I'm asking that because I'm thinking of peacekeeping training, you know, and the, you know, the Slavios that I'm talking about, the 1990s by this point, you know, it would be set up training peacekeepers going to, you know, going to former Yugoslavia, particularly Bosnia, and, you know, again, all the cultural constructions of that as, you know, you're going to a place of violence when you're going there, you know, it was the message that Western armed forces were giving about the Balkans.  And so, you know, that's sort of why, you know, why I'm asking that question. And the next one really is amusing rather than anything that's got a question mark on it.  That's making me think of how does the, you know, the immediate post-Yugoslav Croatian romance with American army surplus, and, you know, the sort of a very Susan Jeffery, you know, aesthetic of the imagined Vietnam, I think, you know, but was part of the way in which the very early Croatian armed forces were being represented in Croatian media on the outbreak of the war. And then in 1994, MPI turns up, you know, after the Washington agreements to actually train the Croatian army. So, you know, there's not a question that ever comes from that.   Great, should we have Chris go ahead and then Lauren will collect those questions for you, Jesse. And then, yeah, you can respond. Great. Thanks, Amanda. And thanks so much, Jesse. That was just fantastic. I'm really compelling, but also like Aggie said, very convincing in the kind of, in the story you put together. And it was nice to find out along the way that you're a pretty good shot as well. I have two questions. One is the one I think you probably expect me to ask, which is, what do we do? And you've alluded to it a few times. What do we do with the fact that this fetishization of the commando and fetishization of the tactical is clearly very present within movements and politics that operates in resistance to US empire? Like what do we do with the fact that, you know, many more left-wing groups are arming themselves and are arming themselves in a way that is clearly built around a kind of tactical cultural imaginary that wasn't maybe present 50 years ago. Groups like Pink Pistols, the Huey Newton Gun Club, and others, but also you talked about your own kind of interpolation into these kind of fetish worlds. And, you know, I don't think any of us can sort of say we're completely, we sit outside that obviously, right? Because of the kinds of story you're telling. But I wonder what we do with that or what that does to our imaginary of resistance or operation given that interpolation. And then the second question I had, I was really interested in your comment about the cultural production of the city as a war zone in the 80s through the war and drops that enables further militarization into cities. Because you framed that as a legitimating narrative. And a lot of my reading in the last year or so has been about the Black Panther Party. And for the Black Panther parties, the representation of the US city as a war zone was also really central to their narratives, right? Their account was US cities are occupied spaces occupied by the American army. This is a war zone. And so we respond by fighting this war. And so it was interesting to hear that framed as a legitimating narrative for imperial militarism rather than Panther resistance. But it made me wonder what maybe some of the differences are in those framings. Or if you know more about the kind of the history of the framing of the American city as a war zone. And like, what are some of the threads that come together in those accounts? Thanks. Thanks, I'll follow up from Jesse. If you guys can hear me, thanks so much. Or from Chris, thanks so much, Jesse for your talk. And I'm really interested in your responses, questions. And I think mine's a little bit similar to Chris's as you also might expect. But I'll take it somewhat differently. I was thinking about the role of something like apocalyptic imaginaries in this kind of theorizing of the tactical. And the kind of figure of this combat, like something about a sense of, you're related to a sense of self-sufficiency, right? Whether the government can't save us. And again, I think this plays out on the right and the left in ways, but also relates to the racialization of cities. But also just this general kind of sense of a kind of societal breakdown and apocalypse that's coming. And as well as a sort of accelerationist desire, right? For that precise ending. And the ways in which, again, this plays in with this kind of fetishization. So I'm wondering, what role do you see for that? Or do you see the tactical as a kind of a specific instance of that broader kind of apocalyptic imaginary that is very much of the moment right now. Yeah, thanks. Well, you gave me lots of smart questions, the problem of smart friends. And thank you, Alana, for joining us. And as both everyone else who has to take off, I understand, do what you got to do. So I'm gonna try to work my way through this. Catherine, starting with you very quickly. How do Marxist and psychological sense of fetish come from the anthros? Well, yes, of course, the term fetish is coined by anthropologists of what we would today call West Africa and the colonial period, right? And what they argue is that the fetish object is a sort of mundane material object that is invested with divine power, right? Or if we were good Protestants, we would call it idolatry, right? It's right, but it's the investment of a physical object, right? Which is given then social, emotional, spiritual, metaphysical power, right? And that's exactly what Marx wants to pick up on when he is talking about the commodity and its role in capitalism, right? So yes, absolutely. And the reason I referred to Marx as secular mysticism is because that part of the paper actually starts exactly where you did, right? So I start with the anthropologists. What do they mean by fetish? How is it that they're very racist, very colonial ideas of what religion should be inform how they view everyday spiritual practice among West Africans? And they would not apply the same analysis to, for example, a Maria statue or a crucifix or a cross or any of that, right?  And that's exactly what Marx is trying to resonate from, right? And that ultimately psychologists pick up when they talk about, for example, fetishizing of women's shoes or fetishizing long guns or whatever it might be, there's an investment, right? There's a, in the psychological sense, not the political economic sense, right? But there's an investment of the object with enormous power, meaning, resonance. And that's exactly, I think, where the tradition of thinking about fetishes comes out of. And it is deeply colonial, it is deeply Eurocentric in the sense of not being reflexive, right? So that same view of how we invest objects with disproportionate psychological and spiritual meaning is not applied to ourselves, right? It's always those primitives over there or those, right? It's always those, someone else. But I think the question of investment is really central to my use, right? This is why I'm dissatisfied with the strictly Marxist view of the fetish, right? The fetishization of commodities is like a wonderfully abstract metaphor to help us see how capitalism works.  Sexological studies, sociology of sexuality is much more interesting because it has that more reflexive side. So the question of investment is really important to me because I think the investment picks up on something I see in Aggie's work in particular where she talks about the role of gaming in pulling the individual player to invent, right? There's an investment in the role, right? That play makes different than being forced to do it, right? Being forced to do push-ups doesn't quite change you the same way that like really wanting to play that new game does. So I think the question of investment is really central and yeah, so I like that. In terms of how is training being designed and conducted in terms of threat perception, there's really fascinating work and James Serdarian did a bunch with the sort of model Iraqi villages that were constructed in the California desert, many of whom recruited Arab-Americans to serve as actors as both, and then of course US forces would engage as hostels in local dress.  That's what it looks like. It's a whole model village built in the middle of a desert staffed with actors speaking Arabic and it's designed to help be as realistic as possible. But the question of how does the training sort of call the soldier's individual investment? Well, I think that's where I would just pick up on something that one of the questions that Maggie asked that I didn't get to which is the question of what's so gripping what's so fun about this? And I think the reason this training model is exactly because it's fun. It's fun to play paintball. It's fun to play first person shooter video games. It's fun to imagine being, it's fun to imagine being able to defend ourselves. And as, again, to pick up on something Chris alluded to with the Huey Newton Gun Clubs and the Pink Lavender pistol leagues and various other outreach efforts Socialist Rifle Association here in the US has explicit outreach efforts to the trans community right now. I actually have one of their pieces of propaganda right here, trans workers take up your rifles. And so when we think about what is all of this doing is it's offering whoever the subject might be the opportunity to hail themselves into a fetishized role to hail themselves into someone who can be powerful someone who can protect themselves. And I think for a lot of us who have experienced violence in our lives the ability to defend ourselves in all scenarios is very tempting. For myself it started with martial arts training which that was fed by homophobic violence I experienced as a child. So being attacked by bullies led me to want to study martial arts. Then when I had learned martial arts I still got my butt kicked by groups of boys. So then I wanted a weapon. And there's sort of an arms race for self-defense. And we know this, where I are people.  But I think the reason all of this works so well is because it's so fun. It's psychologically compelling to feel powerful but it's also pleasurable. A day at the shooting range with your friends is fun. Doing maneuvers is fun. Paintball is super fun. And the question of why is it so fun is, I mean I'm not quite there yet that I have an answer. I just know that it is. It's enormously compelling. It's got all kinds of people participating. And as we invest ourselves in it I think we get captured by the culture around it. So it's one of the things that people on the left of the United States to pick up on Chris's point who've been engaging in more arming and training in the last 10, 15 years. It's something we run into all the time. It's really hard to go to a gun shop that's not super Trumpy and racist. There was a briefly lived on internet seller called Lowers for Liberals where you can get lower receivers. The part of the firearm that's considered regulated by the United States is the lower receiver. The rest of it is not a firearm. So you can buy barrels and order them online. I can order ammunition shipped to my house. I can do all sorts of stuff like that all online. But the lower receiver is the stamped part. It's the part. So there was a website called Lowers for Liberals and it failed. They went out of business. So the whole capture by the right wing of gun culture is strongly associated also with Republican electoral victories.  And sure, there are other politics of resentment and race and gender. I'm not trying to deny any of that or abortion, which is huge also for Republican voters. But firearms is a big deal. And with one party firmly saying we want to regulate and disarm the country. The other party saying, no, no, no, no, you can have all the weapons you want. The problem becomes that the culture is sort of captured by these, these politics. You all have asked me tons of questions. Lauren, final, apocalypticism. Yes, yes, yes, yes. Apocalypticism is super important to all of this. And picking up on Chris's question also about the Black Panthers, I found myself, as soon as you were asking your question, rehearsing hip hop lyrics from Dead Prez's album, 1999 album, Let's Get Free, right? Could you be ready for civil war? Could you take the life of somebody you know or have feelings for if necessary? I got cousins in the military. But far as I'm concerned, they died when they registered. There's a whole resonance in hip hop culture around the end times. Will you be ready when it hit? Will you be ready when the troops are on the street? Will you be ready when the grocery stores close their doors? And there are all of these images, super permeating hip hop culture about the end times and the need to prepare or to quote Max Brooks of World War Z fame, right? We need to organize before they rise. We have to get ready before the zombie apocalypse hits. So I think apocalypticism is linked to the commando fetish. I don't think they're the same thing. But I think the commando fetish offers a, something to do. If it feels like the world is ending, what am I to do about it? Well, the commando fetish offers one possible answer. Prep, right? You can be a prepper. You can fill your basement with all the food and ammunition and everything you need so that when things hit the fan, you are ready. And I see that there's more questions. I apologize for not getting to all of them. I'm trying to cover as much as I can. I think Michael had a... Yeah, Michael, go ahead. Hi. Um, so before 9-11, special operations were mostly considered sort of rebellious or like the redheaded stepchildren of the military. They were very disliked. No one wanted to deal with them. They're like, particularly in the general military and all the rest of it. And on the other hand as well, a lot of people within special operations sort of went there and you'll also see this come out in their own culture. So, you know, t-shirt companies and things like that. It becomes all about the health.  How do you combine these two things of sort of active institutional and cultural rebellion against the mainstream end up becoming the fetish of the mainstream? Awesome question, Michael. I really appreciate it. I think that's exactly how it works, particularly in the 80s. So in 1980, 1980s cinema, there's an association between sort of special forces and vigilantism, right? So a lot of the heroes of the 80s are not conventional soldiers or cops. It's always one rogue officer alone, right? Or, you know, that voice, right? It always works when people are like, what's the commando fetish? What are you talking about? Well, so just listen, right? One man, home from Afghanistan. He sees his wife killed.  Because the cultural script is so hyper available. So I think you're right to highlight special forces as outsiders. It's precisely that they don't follow the rules that they're deployed in places we are not at war. They're killing people who are not our enemies. There's a non-acknowledgement, right? A large number of black ops are unacknowledged, right? And so one of the problems then becomes for the special forces community is that they are valorized, but as you pointed out, it wasn't seen as a career path that would lead to a general ship. And it's still not, with the exception of Petraeus and a few others, right? And even he, he was in the airborne. He wasn't actually special forces. So what sort of comes together is that insider, outsider, tough guy who can do anything he wants, that is, I think, exactly what is so fetishized, especially in sort of schlubby, to use your term, a U.S. culture where a lot of us, and particularly around the politics of masculinity and white resentment, it's sort of like, well, the factory's closed, there's no jobs. My body doesn't look like it did when I was a high school football player. But those guys out there, they're the ones who are doing it, right? And so I think the correlation between the commando and the vigilante is really, really important. That the, exactly, Catherine, thank you for your point, right? That the conventional military lost Vietnam. And the truth is that special forces also, the fetishized image is not who special forces generally are, right? The majority of U.S. special forces are rangers, and they engage in what security cooperation and training missions. So they're the people most likely to speak multiple languages. They generally have master's degrees, at least. I wish my, our good friend and colleague, Catherine Fisher was here, right? She teaches at NDU at Fort Bragg. So these are her students, right? She literally teaches these folks. They are more intellectual, more culturally sensitive, higher performing in terms of intelligence testing and those sorts of things than the average lifelong soldier. But at the same time, that's not the image we have of them, right? It's all Navy SEALs, yeah, Delta Force, whatever. But I think the reason that the fetishization has been so successful is the rule of ex-special forces in the commercialization of these skills. So it's not that the special forces themselves as in the Green Berets in the 1990s were super important to build Clinton's foreign policy. They weren't, as Catherine pointed out, right? The private military contractors who basically created a Croatian army, they were much more important than the Green Berets or the Navy SEALs were. But it was the ex-special forces who were recruited to do all of that private military contracting, or at least people who claimed to have been, right? The joke is that there are 7,084 people who claim to have been on SEAL Team 6 when they killed Bin Laden, right? And this hyperproliferation of this kind of expertise, it goes alongside its commodification, its commercialization. If you can sell your experience having been in the Mossad or in special air services or whatever, you can become a fitness trainer, a firearms instructor. You can go to the Philippines and set up your own little army, right? There's lots of things that become possible because this image of the commando gives you a disproportionate sort of, and the Gurkhas, yeah, of course, your work, of course, right? Talk about fetishization, right? They've all long been fetishized. So I mean, I think there's a way that the outsider has long been fetishized in military culture because military culture is so based on conformity, right? And that was the puzzle I sort of wrestled with in my 2016 piece, Sexy Warriors, right? Is this question of like, how can people who have zero freedom, like literally someone tells them when to wake up in the morning, what to eat, how to tie their shoes? How can they look down on me and my masculinity? Which is what I ran into when I was doing field work, right?  It's all I heard about civilians. That's all I got. And I found it fascinating, this sort of dialectic between strict discipline and masculinity, right? So these guys who submit themselves to incredible discipline give up all of their sort of everyday choices in return are given a fetishized masculine identity. Well, I think there's something about the commando that recovers that sense of choice making, right? They're allowed to grow their beards out. Soldiers are not. They're allowed to have longer hair. Soldiers are not. They're allowed to use non-conventional weapons. They're allowed to use their own modifiers on their ARs. There are even fundraisers to buy a sniper scope so that they can have the custom things that the military won't give them. So I think that there's a whole cultural, economic and psychological production that I don't wanna say it's like everything is everything, but it really does glom together in my view, right? That the cultural imagery produced by Hollywood reinforces the political economy of the training, which itself is then institutionalized and brought into policing, border forces and regular military training. And so, yeah, it's complicated and I maybe need some causal arrows to help me be a better social scientist about it, but I see this complex as doing a lot of different work. And I hope that answers your question. Well, that's great. I think... We've gone a half hour over, so thank you all for sticking with us. But we started a bit late and this has been such a great space, Jesse. Thank you so much. I think like I'm echoing Aggie's thoughts too, so well into term one, we're at the point of... Well, we started with exhaustion and point of further exhaustion that it's lovely to be able to engage with research that like you said to ISA, some of those panels where you actually leave feeling energized through the experience. So Jesse, thank you so much for that. I love your work and I love how you're grappling with the messiness of capitalism, imperialism, racism, gender, queer, all of that coming together in such sophisticated and interesting ways. So I love your work. Thank you so much for presenting in this space. I appreciate it and I just wanna particularly thank you for inviting me. This is my first presentation since my position was eliminated. So it was enormously useful psychologically to get me out of my rut. And so I do appreciate the opportunity to be with all of you. Yeah.


Annika, what is your take on the European Green Deal and especially obviously the transport side of it? I think that if we look at the taxation of fossil fuels that is likely to increase, then look at how public transport and railways are taxed with possibly lower rates or exemptions because of their sustainability advantage that can help the model shift as well. How do transport authorities that have a sustainable urban mobility plan that were the fastest to respond to the Covid crisis and to make, let's say, a good use of the opportunities that were in the lockdown? The ambition to phase out fiscal advantage for salary cars in Belgium is not reflected in the governmental agreement. Will you be able to still make a change on this important issue for Belgium mobility? Two important things about salary cars, first of all is you have to electrify the system, you have to have less polluting cars on the way, but we want to change the system with a global fiscal reform which makes that you pay people in euro and not in cars. It's not about demonising individual car drivers, but making sure that we give them the package of incentives and alternatives so that things change. If we're thinking globally about the European Green Deal, we also have to act locally. Statistics show that people tend to prioritise a car over public transport in the current situation. Are there already strategies being developed or have you applied as well to make them use public transport again? So I think that rebuilding trust to communication is one thing and then to ensure that over the long term we've got the capacities to attract people to transport by giving them the space and making it convenient and using more digital tools as well that can enhance the system overall. I mean, that is the second step after COVID globally is to make public transport more attractive, to make it the number one choice of citizens if they think, I need to get from A to B, how do I do that?


at work that's going on around the world. I teach a course at Harvard University Extension School. It's called the Neuroscience of Learning. And we are also doing a special issue in the Nature Partner Journal on the science of learning, looking at the lasting impact that COVID has had on the changing educational landscape. And so in the short time that I have to try to keep within the time frame of just a few minutes, I wanted to use maybe three or four concepts from the learning sciences and then offer five or six examples concretely from Ecuador and from the United States. Basically, observations that we've had of what has happened during these times of COVID. So first and foremost, in order to address COVID or any other problem situation as a teacher or a policymaker, you first have to define the terms. And the main problem that many of us had at the beginning of COVID almost two years ago is that nobody had a prior experience to use to be able to plan and to look ahead and what needed to happen because we'd never lived through that before. Since all new learning passes through this filter of prior experience, we looked for what we already knew about the problem and we didn't really have a lot of information. And so that made us go to a tier two kind of an intervention, which is to when you don't have something that's necessarily easy to associate with a problem, what is COVID? We don't know how to respond to this in education. You should probably use an analogy. Analogies are a good second best option when you don't have prior knowledge of something. Can we use metaphorical thinking or analogies? And in the case of COVID, rather than think of COVID as a problem, a lot of teachers that we worked with began to look at this as a catalyst. And if we use an analogy, COVID began to be seen as more like a spotlight or a magnifying glass or the volume dial on a speaker, which sort of amplified and magnified our understanding of already existing problems. I think Cecilia really put her finger on the pulse of things when she pointed out that none of these things that we began to now dig deeper into are new. In fact, they're old problems. But thanks to COVID, and I know it's horrible to attribute something positive to something that was so negative, but we've now begun to really see the origins of many of the problems in education that have always existed. And so basically this gets to maybe six examples I'd like to call out from Ecuador and from the United States, which happened simultaneously. And to put this into context as far as numbers are concerned, right now I'm living in New York and Ecuador, they have about the same rate of vaccination, believe it or not, both the city of New York and the country of Ecuador have about 70% of the population vaccinated. And that permits people to go back to school. They actually started to go back to school, but with a very new lens on things. So teachers in the classrooms, as well as policymakers, we're thinking about different issues. And the six issues I wanna highlight to sort of put into play another idea from the Learning Sciences, which is that a good diagnosis is half of the cure to the problems that we might face. And so we realized, I'm gonna name a couple of problems and then maybe point out the some of the things that we realized were at the roots of that, which are now pointing to very promising areas for policy decision making. The first is that many kids were going without education. We knew this before COVID even hit, but it really called out the inequities that exist around the world. And it also did something that Cecilia pointed out. It highlighted that the internet, which the United Nations is now labeled as a human right, it's not just a luxury, but this is something that everybody should have access to. It also sped up this acceptance of technology as a support system for education. And so what are some of the things we gain from this? And some of the research, I think that Marcello was so good in her details, but I'm going to talk in more global terms just for time, we now know where these populations are that were not being attended. It was really glaring that the inequities in many rural areas of Ecuador, as well as in the rural parts of the United States, people who didn't have access to internet, people who didn't have tablets on hand, people who had to share one computer device for the whole family and they were working from home, but also maybe the parent was even a teacher and having to teach and learn and the father was having to use the computer for his work. All of these things pointed out really specific populations and really more precise interventions. A second problem that we faced or that we saw is that many, many teachers have left the profession. COVID was the last straw. And this really brought to light and made society really value the teaching profession as a whole and appreciate all of the things that teachers really did and realized that it's something that we depend on but we'd taken for granted. And this also made us look, see this idea that society has finally, I believe, accepted that teachers are really the linchpin in development and this called attention to this new professional development that's needed for teachers to be able to function in the current world. It also accelerated this concept when teachers started to leave of more an international schoolhouse. For those systems that did have internet but didn't have teachers who were good at teaching, we saw many creative insights. For example, a great math teacher in Ecuador ended up teaching in Florida and in Spain when those places didn't have teachers. And so we saw a very different role for teachers on an international scale. A third problem that we encountered and everybody has seen is that parents had to support their kids in their home learning which was interesting but we've always known. It takes a village to raise a child but the appreciation of this home and school partnership was really thrown into the forefront and it's something that we presume will not be lost when we go back to regular schooling. As Bob pointed out, the OECD really threw a magnifying glass onto the issues of the haves and have nots. It's really clear that school systems that were already good weathered this fine and school systems that were bad really, some of them lost more than an entire year of schooling. And so this showed though how we need more international cooperation. It forced almost a global response in terms of vaccines and technology and education onto the scene which helps us now actually celebrate this kind of a concept of one plus one is three. You have a good system. I have a good system but if we share it we may have a better response to the problem than if we try to go it alone. So isolated interventions are not necessarily as impacting as ones that are used in a global sense. A fifth problem that we had was that we showed how people are totally vulnerable in this huge issue of social emotional learning. It made social emotional learning within schools mainstream. It was only even 10 years ago you would never think that schools were responsible for the emotional well-being of a child. But we realized that that was huge and that was a big part of learning and so that became incorporated. But we also found that speaking with the school district, the public schools in Hawaii, the superintendent has pointed out that between 25 and 30% of students and teachers don't wanna go back. And when you try to look at well what are the root causes of this, there's many different reasons. Some have to do with kids who experienced bullying beforehand or just the distance to get to school or that the pace of learning was better for them when they were at home. So this was really throwing a monkey wrench into their system of everybody has to go back because there are some people we see and this is even happening in the workplace, right? Some people don't want to go back now. So what do we do about that and how will that create a presence for technology and education from here on out, okay? It also brought attention to this idea that it's okay not to be okay and that people need people and whether or not that be and looking at our faces in Zoom or going to a mass classroom, people need to be with each other. And the last point I'll make here is that we saw how many of us had to move everything to a Zoom format like we're in right now. And for one thing, we realized there's a lot of stuff you can do without having to go into the office which was really kind of interesting, right? But it's also added a very interesting flavor to meetings and maybe Roberto will even say that this has happened with this particular meeting for Brazil, but almost all meetings now and especially conferences like this one now consider international participation. And this has moved a new agenda of international transdisciplinary thinking that hopes to generate this kind of translational science that brings this to the average person. So in summary, I just to say that we need to have clear definitions of what we're focused on that all in learning passes through this filter of prior experience and we're just now coming to grips of what it means to deal with a pandemic but we have to use the analogies that are in front of us to be able to laser focus in on what real problems are and using a good diagnosis is gonna be half the cure. So I'd like to just reiterate this terribly worn out idea that every problem is an opportunity but I think that this one has allowed us to focus on problems and education that have been around for a long time which we now finally have a very precise way that we can create policies around responses to them. So thank you very much. And I look forward to also hearing the rest of the speakers and gaining more knowledge from you all. Thank you. Thank you, Tracy. I always appreciate a lot of points in a short period of time and much to think about.


Ansible is this great starting point for open source, and it's, you know, if you want to be a Python programmer, if you're interested in like sysadmin, kind of like devops, there's something for everyone with Ansible, so getting into universities is something that lives just started, but it's really great work, you know.


How are you all doing? Welcome back to the YouTube channel, your favorite village boy, Mr. Kano Baby, right here in Kinshasa, Congo. Kinshasa is such a beautiful city, filled with vibrant people, but there's something that I really do not understand in this country, the fact that each and every passenger who is living in Kinshasa has to pay $55 as a go pass. They call it airport tax. If you don't pay it, you're not flying. Of which I think it's ridiculous because the ticket to enter Kinshasa and the ticket to live in Kinshasa is extremely expensive, which I believe the tax is already included. This was an unexpected trip, but yeah, I have to leave Kinshasa and then come back again in the next 10 days going to a country which is seven years behind. And guess which country it is?  I mean, not the other virginity, but it's my first time on a business class, man. And come on, we gotta share this experience together, right? So yeah, stick and stay with me. Let me show you how a village boy found himself on a first class. Thank you. But before I share my first and unforgettable, beautiful experience on business class, I must agree with Ms. Triddy that nothing is impossible. Do you guys know that I've been promoting Ethiopian Airlines for the past three years with no strings attached? I told you guys to promote Ethiopian Airlines. You see that thing? This is your boy Mr. Maya, and today is 18th August, 2018, and I'm backing on a journey from Kwanjul to work at the Sababa. So I hope you guys join me and let's help out. That's Singaporean Airlines. I don't know if you guys can see it. That's Singaporean Airlines and also Ethiopian Airlines over there. So I'm going to sit here for extra 10 minutes because I've been here for the past two hours and boarding has already started. That's why I want to record this video. If you are African watching me right now, I just want to ask you, when was the last time you patronized an African airline? If you know you're one of those people who doesn't patronize African Airlines, please change and start using African Airlines today. We have Ethiopian Airlines, we have Kenyan Airlines, we have Rwanda Airlines, we have South African Airlines, we have Tanzanian Airlines. Use these airlines, man. This is a way to promote Africa. This is my fourth time of flying Ethiopian Airlines within this year. Oh, sorry, we are in 2019. So it's my first time in 2019, but last year I used like three times. It's a way to tell the world what we have. So if you know that you're not telling the world what you have, change and start using an African airline today. I know it's kind of expensive sometimes, it's really expensive to use an African airline, but you know what? Africa needs money, and Africa needs your money. These are people and places to live. This place is so green, blessed with so many natural resources. A country like that, people should not live in poverty. But majority of the people are actually living in poverty. I know it's the world's richest country, but the people of the country are not exploiting what they have, but it's been exploited by non-Kongolese, which makes everything so sad. Yo, it's so beautiful out here, man. Look at that. The river, the Kongo River, it's taking off. Looks like an island right there. There's a city right there. You see it down there. Rivers can have ports. I never knew that rivers can actually have beaches until I came to Kinsasha, so, which means that travel is a whole education there. I've left a lot of things that I never knew until I came to this country, but yo, I feel like this plane, the takeoff is absolutely slow, man. Now it's scary, but now we're part of it. Well, it's probably. No one you've been watching me from. I really appreciate you guys, man. Road to a million. Don't forget to subscribe if you're new to the channel. It's my first time here. I've been using the business class. I really don't know anything in here. Even though I've been on several planes, but it's the first never. I guess there's so many things that are going to be the first.  Yo, their heads are different, you know. Those days sitting there called your headset right here. Classic. A little bit of salad. And I don't even know what this is, unless I open it. This is how my table looks like. Money is really good, I mean, I'm going to tell you how I feel. It feels so different. I don't want to say the food taste different.  Definitely. Evening food in business class tastes so different. I mean, it's the better version of the economy. You guys should increase the food next time. It's in the small food on the plane. But all this food is over. She brought another. See, I'm just going to tell you something here. In real life, I've never tried and then desired. I go straight to the point. I just go and look for my main meal and I'm done. So I feel like today, it's open and I like, it's breaking a lot of my virginity. They just broke my virginity of being on a business class. Virginity of trying three costs meal. Good let's bet. It was the last time we took it open and I like. I just want to tell you like, flights have been alive today, man. The best African ally. Also, Yasma Ruth. I can tell you a lot because I've been patronizing this ally for way back in China. My business is my first time. Whatever you're doing, keep doing it. Whatever you're doing, let them talk, yeah. And use whatever they say as a source of inspiration. As a source of drive that keeps you moving. See, when I started my YouTube career, the people around me are the same people that want to discourage me. And hell, you can't do this. You can't do that. People laughed at me, yeah. But today, yeah, yeah, man. Can you just leave a comment and say, thank God. The same people that laughed at me today, they're saying we're so proud of you. So I'm telling you, never give up on your dreams. Keep doing it. Stay focused. Stay consistent. And trust God. I'm not a big fan of luxury. And this was really worth it. I just want to say, take a shout out to Tip and Eli. For such a special treat. And also, take a shout out to the country manager. You know that I love you, yeah. Thank you so much for this. Really, I appreciate. I'll express in tablets. I just finished eating. You know what? Every lazy person after eating, all they want to do is to sleep.  But I mean, this one, we got a rest, right? So we have so many ways. It can even sleep. But like, those... What book are you reading at this very moment? In the comment section, you might find your book interesting. And I will download or buy one. So yeah. How was my flight, yeah? So, what am I supposed to tell you? We're on the same plane, bro. That is Friends Alone. It's amazing, man. It's just that it was so hard to film. That's the thing. But I was just saying stuff. But I'm going to need to do something. And yeah, definitely going to see you guys in the morning.


Hey co-friends, I'm Bianca Renee and you're watching Bianca Renee Today. And today, the hairstyle challenge continues because that's what we're doing all year long. We're trying new curly hairstyles, forcing ourselves not to just wear our hair down every single day or in a bun. So if you guys wanna see more hairstyles, make sure you follow me on Instagram at MsBiancaRenae. But today I'm gonna try something I've never done before, a cute like faux French braid look without us being able to do a French braid. Man, if I could braid my life would be so much easier for this challenge, but here we are. So this hairstyle is also good for like those wash days that you don't feel like doing a wash day and you wanna push it just like one or two more days. That's when you would do this hairstyle because it doesn't take any curl definition at all. It could be as frizzy as possible. It could be dry. Really doesn't matter.  So let's get started. Shout out to my curl friend collective scrunchie. Slides right off with ease because it's silken so cute. My scalp will always tell me that it's wash day before my actual curls like these can be refreshed but my scalp's getting a little dry, a little flaky. So I'm going to, first, what should I do first? Let's put this down the middle first. We want a nice middle part.  Oh God, it's so hard to separate on dry hair. Wait for it, wait for it. Okay. Ooh, oh yeah, we got some flakes. It's a little dry. Look at the hair. So I'm gonna grab my Sunday to Sunday root refresh. This is a micella rinse infused with apple cider vinegar. This is gonna help get rid of some of those flakes. Kind of like cleaning my scalp without actually washing it. This is really good to use after you work out to get rid of any like sweat that you might have had. Brush any little flakes away until we are ready to wash it. So I'm gonna put this part just away so I don't mess up my part. And now let's just spray this side with some water. And to give it a little bit of moisture, let's just try something new. I'm trying to use as many new random products as possible. This is the Camille Rose Honey Hydrate Leave-In Conditioner. I always just like, cause it literally looks like honey. This has honey, olive fruit oil, castor oil, aloe vera leaf juice, bilberry fruit, sugar cane, sugar maple, a lot of sweet stuff. It's supposed to provide maximum hydration. I think I've used this like once before. I've never talked about it in a video, but let's use it now. Oh, okay. Very honey-like, okay. Camille Rose does win for sweetest smelling products. Like, oh my goodness. It smells like freshly baked cookies. Like you just wanna eat it. It's a very interesting, like slimy consistency for a leave-in conditioner, cause we're so used to creams. But it smells like a cake or like sweets. It kind of feels like you're rubbing syrup in your hair. All right, let me just do some light detangling here at the bottom. Okay, there we go. Now for the hairstyle part. Oh, I'm so nervous. I've seen a lot of different curly girls do this hairstyle before. The most recent video that I was inspired by is by Chelly's Curls. Make sure you follow her. She's like hairstyle queen. She makes everything look so easy, but I don't know how easy it's gonna be for me.  You can get them. At the dollar store, any hair beauty supply store, just about anywhere. But first, we are going to section off this front piece. Just about that much. This is where the postpartum hairs are gonna get interesting. So here's section number one. Then I'm going to make my first ponytail. Okay, section one. Now I'm gonna grab another section. Then you make your next little ponytail and you connect it. Everything in place, I'm going to use my extreme styling gel. Oh, it's like a gallon of gel for like $5. This was from Walmart. And let's just get this section, smooth it out. And then you take the first piece and connect it to the second. And we're just gonna continue to make little ponytails and connect them. Okay, we're getting somewhere. Man, she makes this look so easy. But it's really not. I mean, it's not hard. I'm just so bad at hair styles. Okay, next section.  So that'll probably be baby hairs. Let's grab a nice little chunk here. A little bit of gel, smooth that in, and then connect the ponytail. Oh, my arms hurt. I feel like French braiding would be so much easier if I just learned how. That might have to be a challenge for me this year. Now we just keep adding more and more hair, more and more sections. Okay, pieces are getting bigger. Still connecting. Okay, we're getting somewhere. I feel like you could never see like my parts when I do hair styles. It is all like blends together. I don't know what to do about that. Okay, pieces are getting bigger. Once it gets bigger, just adding a little. Okay, once you get to like this part, the nape of your neck, I think Chelly actually switched to just large scrunchies and then you just kind of make little bubbles.  I don't even know if I'm gonna call these videos like hairstyle tutorials. They're more like, let's watch Bianca figure this out and see if she does it, videos. Yeah, I think I might like the look of bigger scrunchies or we could just kind of squeeze them out. Man, that looks better. Oh, almost gave up there for a second. I'm gonna puff them out, maybe two more. Okay, there's one side. But for my first try, that's all I'm gonna say. Okay, it looks long though. Now let's do the same thing to the other side. So let's just make everything look a little bit cleaner with some edge control and some gel. But overall, I do think it's really cute. It was a little more challenging for me just because I can never like, you can't really see my scalp. Like I want to see the parts and I don't know what I'm doing wrong to where you can't really see. Maybe I need to like twist them in order to see, but I don't know. Leave your comments and suggestions below on what I'm doing wrong as to why I can't see the separation in my hair. But I will keep practicing and hopefully it will get better in time. And let's lay down these baby hairs. Actually, this goes a little loose. I'm gonna use some actual edge control. This is the Myel Rosemary Mint Strengthening Edge Gel. We did it, the final look. I think it looks really cute. It makes my hair look very long and stretched out. I do want to keep practicing though. This was my absolute very first time doing this. I want to figure out how to make my parts more prominent to where you can see them a little bit better. And I think I would do everything tighter next time. So even in the back, let me show you. Looks pretty good. But I'd want to make this part not as loose. And that might mean using like real elastics and making it tighter, but that's for my first try. But I want you guys to try this. Maybe try it this week if you don't have something to try for the week. And tag me on Instagram at MsBeyondGrenet so I can see your cute little, what do we want to call this? Poof braids? Little poof braids? I don't know, we'll think of a name, leave a name down below what we should call this hairstyle. But thank you, Francelli, for inspiring this look. And I will make sure to repost her tutorial on Instagram so you could see how neat she does it. I don't know how she does it. I'ma get there. I'ma get there by the end of the year. If you enjoyed this video, make sure to give me a thumbs up and subscribe. I post new videos every week. You also can follow me on Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter at MsBeyondGrenet. And I hope to see you guys next time. Thanks for watching, BeyondGrenet, today.