Hasta La Gadget!

By James M. Dorsey

When Ramazan Kizil established Dalkurd FF, one of Europe’s most successful immigrant soccer teams, in a remote town in northern Sweden, he dreamt of one day raising the Swedish and the Kurdish flag alongside one another in a European championship. These days, Mr. Kizil’s goals are more immediate: aiding embattled Kurdish fighters fending off attacks by Islamic State, the jihadist group that controls a swath of Syria and Iraq, in the Syrian-Turkish border town of Kobani.

Mr. Kizil’s Dalkurd sparked anger in the Swedish Football Federation (SFF), further fuelled debate within the international sports community about the relationship between sports and politics, and focused attention on the blowback of conflict in the Middle East and North African on migrant communities in Europe, when the club flashed a sign saying ‘Save Kobani’ during a recent soccer match. The club based in Borlänge, an iron and paper mill town 300 kilometres north of Stockholm, raised €3,000 during the match for Kobani that has been a focus of the US-led war on the Islamic State for more than a month.

Against the backdrop of efforts by International Olympic Committee (IOC) president Thomas Bach to acknowledge the intimate relationship between sports and politics in a break with the sport world’s long-standing insistence that the two are separate, Mr. Kizil described his club’s support for Kobani in an interview with Rudaw as “human solidarity.” In response to the SFF’s description of the support for Kobani as “political,” Mr Kizil retorted: “We do not care about their warnings or any eventual penalties.” Adil Kizil, Ramazan Kizil’s son and Dalkurd’s sports manager added: “We can’t just sit and watch while Kobani gets massacred. We must do something.” Some 200,000 people have fled Kobani mostly to Turkey in the last six weeks.

The dispute over the nature of Dalkurd’s support for Kobani raises the question of what the border line is, if there is one, between humanitarian and political aid to groups in distress as a result of conflict as well as the double standards applied by some Western nations towards foreign fighters in the Syrian conflict. Most Western nations have sought to criminalize those of their nationals who join Islamic State as foreign fighters. Some like the Netherlands, however, appear to exempt those who join the Kurds in their fight against the Islamist group.

The distinction between good and bad foreign fighters is likely to loom ever larger. Dalkurd’s support for the Kurdish fight against Islamic State reflects a new resolve among Kurds across Europe as well as a revival of Kurdish hopes for independence. Across Scandinavia, home to many Kurds, groups have demonstrated for Kobani and sought to aid the US-backed Kurdish fighters trying to hold on to the city.

Scores of young German Kurds have joined the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), a group that long championed the ideal of a pan-Kurdish state that would be carved out of Kurdish regions in Turkey, Iraq, Syria and Iran. The group — condemned by Turkey, the European Union and the United States as a terrorist organization — has since lowered its sites to demanding full rights within Turkey in stalled negotiations with the Turkish government.

Sabri Ok, a PKK leader, recently told German magazine Der Spiegel: “The new generation is different from us older people. They are more radical. They have seen the war in Kurdistan and their brothers and sisters have died in Syria. It will be difficult to control them.” For many Kurds, the battle for Kobani, once a secular, democratic Kurdish-governed enclave, represents their aspirations. The fall of Kobani, PKK officials warn, would fuel Kurdish resistance and could revive the Kurdish insurgency in south-eastern Turkey in which some 40,000 people have died since 1984.

The changing Kurdish landscape was highlighted this week with Turkey allowing a convoy of 150 vehicles carrying heavy weaponry and armed Iraqi Kurdish Peshmerga fighters to traverse its territory en route to Kobani to strengthen their Syrian Kurdish brethren.

Dalkurd, one of three Swedish clubs that have fielded Europe’s most successful immigrant teams, was initially launched as a project to create jobs for youth. Dalkurd’s Swedish identity is clearly identifiable on maps; its minority Kurdish identity is not. That makes Dalkurd as much a product of the social and economic challenges facing immigrants in Sweden and elsewhere in Europe as it is of the carve-up of the Ottoman Empire in the early 20th century that turned Kurds into the largest nation without a homeland, and scattered them across the Middle East and the globe.

Dalkurd’s initial players were Kurdish migrants and refugees, and their descendants. Turkish Kurdish immigrants moved to Europe in search of more fertile economic pastures and to escape the suppression of their cultural identity and political rights in Turkey. Dalkurd co-founder Elvan Cicen said instinctively, the founders had thought of naming the club Kurdistan, but on reflection opted for Dalkurd: Dal for Dalarna, the region where Borlänge is located, and Kurd for Kurdistan. Dalarna’s famous wooden horses frame the yellow sun on the red, white and green Kurdish flag that the club
adopted as its own.

“We are both Kurdish and Swedish. Football is our tool to integrate people. We took kids off the streets and away from the gangs. Everybody blamed the kids. But the real problem was the parents, who often were analphabets. The kids lived in different worlds in school and at home. The parents didn’t see what was happening and the kids weren’t integrated. We started involving the parents,” Mr. Cicen said. Dalkurd players have become role models in local high schools. They have sparked a cultural revolution, inspiring girls to form their own team with the support of Dalkurd managers who seek to overcome the objections put forward by conservative parents.

In interviews, Kurdish members of Dalkurd’s board do not hide their empathy for the PKK. Officials in Iraqi Kurdistan, where the PKK has bases, suggested that the group had helped fund Dalkurd, a claim the club’s executives deny. Nevertheless, Dalkurd chairman Kizil, a Kurdish immigrant from Turkey, was sentenced in 2010 in absentia to 10 months in prison in his homeland after giving a speech in his native Kurdish and campaigning on behalf of a pro-Kurdish political party.

Dalkurd’s leadership, much like that of other immigrant communities, draws a distinction between integration and assimilation. “Integration is not assimilation. It’s learning a new culture without losing one’s own. Even if we had Kurdistan, I wouldn’t move there. Sure, my parents didn’t come here to be Swedes. They socialise only with the Kurdish part of Dalkurd. I’m trying to learn from both cultures. Having two cultures is being richer. We would lose if we were only a Kurdish team. They call us the Kurdish national team. That is not a problem but we don’t close the door to other people,” Mr. Cicen said.

James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies as Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, co-director of the Institute of Fan Culture of the University of Würzburg and the author of the blog, The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer, and a forthcoming book with the same title.

When I first popularized cli-fi in 2009, it was initially inspired by Franny Armstrong’s docu-film The Age of Stupid, a work of science and fiction. Starring the late, great Pete Postelthwaite as a melted Arctic-bound archivist of a humanity that dumbly extincted itself (verb intended), Armstrong’s patient multimedia proved the boundary between what is environmental science and what is cultural narrative has always been what William Gibson described in his foundational Neuromancer as a “consensual hallucination.” He was speaking of the cyberspace in which we all now create ourselves, a floating fiction wherein we inhabit avatars and collectively build a multiverse with an actual future.

But as both climate science and science-fiction have lately warned, Earth does not have a future. And neither do we.

This existential bleed is of course the reason that Christopher Nolan’s cli-fi epic Interstellar reportedly feels like a documentary struggling with a blockbuster, as it wrestles with a titanic human species trying to survive its hyperconsumption and narcissism, on a fucking lucky rock spinning through space. It’s also why continuing reports from the too-conservative Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are treated like fiction by sellouts, and always exponentially worse. The latest (finally) explains that global warming is abrupt and irreversible, and that our children will inherit an Anthropocene riven by swallowing seas, searing permadroughts and mass extinction for species of all shapes and sizes.

But both are real, and both are cli-fi.

Cli-fi is not a listicle of films or shows or books or whatever, which take so-called climate change — a political euphemism created to denature global warming’s knockout punch — as their thematic center. Speaking of sellouts, cli-fi is also the near-universal assent of scientists and their studies, which reactionaries laugh off as a hard sell while they pocket payoffs from fossil fools trying to sustain the unsustainable hallucinations of the 20th century. Like the American Dream, the New Deal, the Great Society, globalization, sci-fi itself, all on fading life support as Earth perhaps transforms into Venus. That’s the nightmare haunting Stephen Hawking, who cli-fi analysts should note is a scientific visionary who can only communicate through a computer.

That we have been sleepwalking through such massive destabilization for decades proves that we are much better at consensually hallucinating than we are at separating our sciences and fictions. Indeed, we rule at creating facts first as fictions, so we can resume our consuming ways, avoiding apocalyptic spoiler alerts.

And so we fashion for ourselves mirrors and panopticons specifically to monitor and experience ourselves — in the third person, where Reality reportedly cannot touch us — as we live and die. Cli-fi, like sci-fi and fantasy and spy-fi and psy-fi and so many more, is simply the cultural prism through which we monitor and experience ourselves as we bleed our planet dry while trying to become machines capable of continuing once our galactic luck runs out. Pointing out what is and what is not cli-fi is like pointing out what is and is not cli-sci: It misses both the forest and its deforested trees.

We have always clung to our paradise in space, so we have always been cli-fi, as much as we have tried to ignore it in our programming and profiteering.

Of course Nolan’s studio blockbuster Interstellar is cli-fi, but so is artistry you rarely see making media headlines or cultural histories. Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko’s brilliant animated series The Legend of Korra is a postmodern treatise on our technocultural struggle to achieve an elemental balance between the natural world we’re manipulating and its apocalyptic consequences. It’s a sobering all-ages epic anchored by the most powerful female character on television — which is why it didn’t survive television and is now solely distributed online, where it competes on our laps, pads and phones with cli-fi like The Wachowskis’ Matrix trilogy, Cosmos 1.0 and 2.0, Tolkien’s transmedia Lord of the Rings, Silent Running and The Road and The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones and even Star Wars itself.

Laugh at the ad nauseam, if you must, but try for example arguing whether Star Wars is fantasy or sci-fi with fandom and you’ll quickly realize that these distinctions mean little when applied to the Real World. It is, after all, Harrison Ford, Han Solo himself, who menacingly reminds us that “Every living thing on this planet needs me” while voicing The Ocean in Conservation International’s recent star-studded Nature is Speaking awareness campaign. But it is also Ford who comes off as a “smug, contemptuous and cantankerous” First Worlder in the also star-studded global warming miniseries Years of Living Dangerously, as he lectures post-Suharto Indonesians about “inequity, illegality and corruption” as First Worlders deforest Indonesia to crisis. And it is also the quite wealthy Ford who has paid into a dirty political campaign — assisted by the controversial Arno Political Consultants, whose previous clients include the NRA and oil companies — to continue allowing a money-pit airport in Santa Monica to pollute and crash into its neighbors, who would much rather have a park, thanks. At this point, we can’t even discuss whether Disney, which now owns Han Solo outright, has truly changed its devastating deforestation ways.

These dizzying contradictions bleed in too from the other side of cli-fi’s cultural prism, in so-called Reality, where everything is going to literal hell, science be damned. A perceptible documentary like Margaret Brown’s award-winning The Great Invisible, which sifts through the land and lives wrecked by Halliburton and British Petroleum’s oily Deepwater Horizon fuck-up, probably sounds like a fairy tale to BP’s great communicator Geoff Morrell, the Department of Defense ex-press secretary who recently, infamously argued that, “No, BP Didn’t Ruin the Gulf.” Morrell might be happier with the perhaps more conventionally heroic retcon of Deepwater Horizon, starring Mark Wahlberg, whose last vehicle Lone Survivor was called a “jingoistic snuff film” by LA Weekly‘s Amy Nicholson. Deepwater Horizon is a fiction that might have more facts than The Great Invisible, for someone in Morrell’s compromised state.

You might as well include with these extractivist rewrites director Erik Skjoldbjærg’s Pioneer, which is marketed as a conspiracy thriller about the Norwegian oil boom of the ’80s. That boom’s real-world disaster capitalism, according to the also compromised Tony Blair, was “utterly essential” to the “electoral success” of Margaret Thatcher, who is herself a vehicle for rapacious conservatism most impressively dissected in Adam Curtis‘ docuseries The Living Dead, which screens like a surreal fantasy. All of these exercises, in turn, roughly collide with the aptly named Extreme Realities: Severe Weather, Climate Change and Our National Security, the new Matt Damon-narrated episode of Journey to Planet Earth, a PBS series premised on the (correct) assumption that viewers really need to take a trip to the planet they already live on — through Afghanistan’s Taliban and Kenya’s drought to doomed Bangladesh and burning Russia — to understand what is real and what is not.

From The Living Dead to The Walking Dead, and back and beyond, all of these fantasies of terror and terraformation, in a world gone mad with environmental destruction and voracious consumption, are cli-fi’s chameleon skins.

This is why politicians, scientists, spokespeople and other paid actors sound satisfied when voicing no-shit-Sherlock absurdities like “Climate change is real” and “The science isn’t settled” — as if we truly wanted real change or settled science, when they so painfully interfere with our desires and addictions. The most apocalyptic cli-fi in recent memory is indeed the IPCC’s AR5, which is less of a road map out of the planetary hell of our own making than a rerun of how we got here for anyone paying attention to our downward spiral. To get reductive about it, scientists often look backwards, clouded by funding and excuses, while artists often look forward, captivated by cash and fame.

This is why the mainstream talks as if Nolan’s Interstellar and the IPCC’s AR5 are somehow separate, as if they existed on different planets, on either side of a self-aware divide, when they are nothing of the sort after all the votes for hope and change are finally counted.

Because the fact is that we live in an exponentially warming world where the IPCC routinely underestimates its catastrophic predictions, even though political and economic elites dependent upon dirty fuels pay to propagandize its apocalyptic mirror as way too fractured. Meanwhile, self-professed “geeks” opine endlessly about whether programming and production about the end of the world as we know it, from Interstellar to The Hunger Games to The Hobbit and back again, can be squashed into labels and genres and marketing specifically created to slice and dice cultural experience into more capitalizable sections. For years, I have called this study of exponential misreading exponology: When it comes to global warming, exponology argues, we are always too slow, too wrong, too often.

Cli-fi fits into this puzzle by annihilating barriers we selfishly erect between science and fiction, between Self and the Other, between our overheating Earth and cold, deep space. Interstellar, like all cli-fi, oscillates between scientific analysis and postmodern pastiche, bowing to 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Wizard of Oz and other big-picture epics about species survival and self-fulfilling evil. Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke’s transmedia 2001 legendarily charted the evolution of Earth’s higher beings just at the beginning of their interstellar journey; Interstellar finds them nearly destroyed by greatly depressing Dust Bowls past and present. This bleed will further intensify when the apartheid, tsunamis and mass extinctions of Clarke’s Childhood’s End arrives next year as a Syfy soap.

So whether they begin as blockbusters, documentaries or scientific studies, cli-fi facts and fictions are continually in flux, as humanity goes about its death-dealing business as usual. Apocalyptic programming is always where we have unsuccessfully stashed our neuroses and psychoses, because we just can’t handle the devolutionary truth. Which is that we have created a climate of terror and terraformation that is spinning out of control, and we don’t want it to stop.

Because stopping would mean unplugging the machines we have become, right now, before it is too late. And I’m sorry, Dave, I’m afraid we can’t do that.

Five dry martinis and Tiga’s Bugatti track on repeat. That’s all I need to work and play today. [NSFW for bare breasts and absurd 1980s hipsterfest overload full of old Macintosh computer, phones, arcades, and people in funny clothing.]

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PORT HUENEME, Calif. (AP) — A military jet crashed into a field near a naval base off the Southern California coast on Wednesday, killing the pilot, authorities said.

The plane crashed and disintegrated at around 5:15 p.m. Wednesday near Naval Station Ventura County, sending up a huge plume of billowing black smoke. The Ventura County Fire Department reported the pilot was killed. Nobody on the ground was hurt.

Federal Aviation Administration spokesman Allen Kenitzer said the aircraft was a Hawker Hunter MK.58.

The cause of the crash wasn’t immediately known, nor was it clear if the plane was taking off or attempting to land at the base near the city or Port Hueneme, about 65 miles northwest of Los Angeles.

Kenitzer said the FAA and the National Transportation Safety Board are investigating.

A spokeswoman for Naval Base Ventura County did not immediately respond to phone messages.

The Hawker Hunter is a single-seat fighter-ground attack plane.

In May 2012 another Hawker Hunter crashed into a farm field near the Navy base, killing the pilot. In that instance, Thomas Bennett, 57, was piloting the privately owned jet. His plane had been contracted to play the enemy in training exercises.

In May 2011, three members aboard a Boeing 707 tanker loaded with jet fuel escaped with only minor injuries when their aircraft skidded off the runway while taking off from the base and exploded into flames.

That plane was carrying civilians and had a contract to provide fuel transport.

DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — The group dedicated to electing and re-electing Republican governors has now raised more than $100 million on New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s watch.

The Republican Governors Association announced late Wednesday that it has brought in $102 million since Christie took over on Dec. 1, the most of any chair. The group was not required to release the new numbers under any federal guidelines. And they will not be verifiable until December. But they serve as a show of strength in the race’s final stretch.

Republicans are defending 22 of 36 gubernatorial seats that voters will decide on Tuesday.

The group’s Democratic counterpart reported raising $47 million in 2014 through the end of September.