evilkid

[evilkid]

[“… on the whole survivors crave precisely the things that have been demonstrated to alleviate their pain and support their well-being. These things, it turns out, are also consistent with the interests of justice and safety.

To begin the conversation about appropriate responses to violence, survivors first want validation that what happened to them is wrong. They want their pain taken seriously, and they do not want to be blamed or judged for what happened to them. They deserve this validation no matter who they are, what they did, or where they were when they were hurt. They need it no matter what our societal biases are about “people like them,” no matter what their criminal record may be, no matter whether they reported the crime to the police or didn’t. This validation matters in part because it reaffirms exactly what has been compromised when someone has been hurt: the belief that they live in a world that rejects violence and in which they should be able to be safe. It is easier to come through a terrible aberrant experience and be held in a society that recognizes its impact than to experience violence as an expression of the society’s norms, values, and expectations. In clearly, directly, and repeatedly affirming that what a survivor sustained is wrong, we stake a claim for a world in which what people endured should not have happened in the first place, and we walk with them in the process of re-creating and returning to (or creating for the first time) that world.

Once we have established our recognition that what happened to them is wrong, survivors want answers. Information contributes substantially to what people in the trauma recovery field describe as the formation of a “coherent narrative”—a story about what happened and why that the survivor can believe, make sense of, find some meaning in, and live with. So, for example, for survivors who before the crime believed that bad things do not happen to good people, there are two primary ways within that narrative for them to tell the story of what happened: either (a) that they are actually a bad person and therefore less deserving of safety, of good things, even of love; or (b) that their goodness, the way they live, their righteous behavior, their attempts to be consistently caring and ethical and kind do not matter and will not keep them safe. Both of those stories are far worse than the one they believed before the crime. In coming through the traumatic experience, the survivor who is telling this story will have to grieve the worldview they once held—one that made them feel whole and made it possible to expect at least some real measure of safety—and will have to form a new worldview that is workable and includes the reality of what has happened to them. That new narrative may be as simple (and as profound) as “Even terrible things are survivable with love,” or “I am more resilient than I ever knew,” or “Hurt people hurt people,” or countless other ways survivors make sense of and integrate their pain. These stories also help survivors accomplish a core feat of trauma healing: to arrange the story into their memory so they no longer experience it as eternal and ongoing.

But these new narratives are hard to build on the basis of mystery and doubt, so the more information a survivor has about what happened and why, the more thoroughly and quickly they are positioned to heal. There is almost never anyone who knows more about what happened to a survivor and why than the person who caused them harm. Survivors who want answers to their questions therefore need and deserve to be able to ask these questions and get those answers: Why did you do it? Why did you choose me? What, if anything, could I have done to stop you? Did you think I did something to you? Did you think I was someone else? Was that a real gun? Were you really prepared to shoot me? Did you feel bad at the time? Do you feel bad now? What would you have done if I had fought back? What happened to you? Did you think you could get away with this? People are built to heal, and when we have information, we are profoundly capable of putting it into the service of our healing. The problem is that survivors rarely have access to such information because every response our systems have created to manage their relationship with the person who hurt them is designed to keep them separate rather than to help them come together productively.”]

danielle sered, from until we reckon: violence, mass incarceration, and a road to repair, 2019

[evilkid]

"That is why the fundamental problem of political philosophy is still precisely the one that Spinoza saw so clearly, and that Wilhelm Reich rediscovered: "Why do men fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation?" How can people possibly reach the point of shouting: "More taxes! Less bread!"? As Reich remarks, the astonishing thing is not that some people steal or that others occasionally go out on strike, but rather that all those who are starving do not steal as a regular practice, and all those who are exploited are not continually out on strike: after centuries of exploitation, why do people still tolerate being humiliated and enslaved, to such a point, indeed, that they actually want humiliation and slavery not only for others but for themselves? Reich is at his profoundest as a thinker when he refuses to accept ignorance or illusion on the part of the masses as an explanation of fascism, and demands an explanation that will take their desires into account, an explanation formulated in terms of desire: no, the masses were not innocent dupes; at a certain point, under a certain set of conditions, they wanted fascism, and it is this perversion of the desire of the masses that needs to be accounted for."

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Page 29)

[evilkid]

[evilkid]

this article made me so sad it triggered my acid reflux and im on the verge of crying

“You’ve never had to chant: ‘Shame on the Israeli aggressors!’, you’ve never had to protest the criminal war in Vietnam, read news about provocations in revolutionary Cuba. How far away these events are from you! […] Young crowd of 2017! We are sure that you have justified the trust your heroic predecessors have invested in you, that you have created a new world.”

[evilkid]

revolutionaries who came after marx and expanded on his work were not rejecting his method of analysis, they were using dialectical materialist thought to overcome the shortcomings of its origin in 19th century europe and make it useful to them. like essentially what "marx and lenin were irrelevant old white dudes but I'm going to pick and choose parts of global south revolutionary theory built on socialism to idealize" does is conveniently abandon the basic building blocks of historical materialism that would let you advance their ideas as they did for marx and lenin and make that theory impossible to apply to the task at hand

[evilkid]

“He is always on the brink of suicide … because he seeks salvation through the routine formulas suggested to him by the society in which he lives.” — Umberto Eco on Charlie Brown

[evilkid]

bingo

[evilkid]

[evilkid]

“So, when these gentlemen say, ‘You are utopians, you anarchists are dreamers, your utopia would never work,’ we must reply, ‘Yes, it’s true, anarchism is a tension, not a realization, not a concrete attempt to bring about anarchy tomorrow morning.’ But we must also be able to say but you, distinguished democratic gentlemen in government that regulate our lives, that govern us through the opinions that you form daily in your newspapers, in the universities, schools, etc., what have you gentlemen accomplished? A world worth living in? Or a world of death, a world in which life is a flat affair, devoid of any quality, without any meaning to it? A world where one reaches a certain age, is about to get one’s pension, and asks oneself, ‘But what have I done with my life? What has been the sense of living all these years?’”

— The Anarchist Tension, Alfredo M. Bonanno

[evilkid]

A CONSIDERATION

THE SPECTACLE IS EVERYWHERE AND SURROUNDS US SO IF YOU START SWINGING YOUR FISTS YOU CAN PROBABLY GIVE IT A GOOD WALLOP

[evilkid]

The global food economy is massively inefficient. The need for standardized products means tons of edible food are destroyed or left to rot. This is one reason more than one-third of the global food supply is wasted or lost; for the U.S., the figure is closer to one-half. The logic of global trade results in massive quantities of identical products being simultaneously imported and exported—a needless waste of fossil fuels and an enormous addition to greenhouse gas emissions. In a typical year, for example, the U.S. imports more than 400,000 tons of potatoes and 1 million tons of beef while exporting almost the same tonnage. The same is true of many other food commodities and countries. The same logic leads to shipping foods worldwide simply to reduce labor costs for processing. Shrimp harvested off the coast of Scotland, for example, are shipped 6,000 miles to Thailand to be peeled, then shipped 6,000 miles back to the UK to be sold to consumers. The supposed efficiency of monocultural production is based on output per unit of labor, which is maximized by replacing jobs with chemical- and energy-intensive technology. Measured by output per acre, however—a far more relevant metric—smaller-scale farms are typically 8 to 20 times more productive.

5 November 2024

[evilkid]

I wish you could see Shinzo too buddy

[evilkid]

"When all you have is a broom, the whole world starts looking like dishes"

[evilkid]

when i was 13 i saw this gif of stalin and starting to copy what he does with his fingers when waving bye to people and my mom told me "stop doing that you look gay"

[evilkid]

“this is my HBO max profile.

i have shared my password with dozens of people and told them to use any profile except Chet.

if they click on Chet, they will be taken to locked Kid’s Profile set to TV-G which they can not exit without obtaining a PIN number from me, which I entered without looking and have no way of ever remembering.

i do this to feel.”

[evilkid]

this poem is about being nonbinary.

[evilkid]

I wish I could find the original post but many years ago I was crashing at a high school friends house and he had me sleeping on some couch cushions that unfolded into a “bed,” except the cushions kept shifting and separating as you slept on them. So I had this elaborate dream that everyone on the planet had at some point been forced to sleep at my friends house, and the situation with the cushions separating was a single common experience that every living human had. And world peace was achieved through a movement called “push them together,” accompanied by a motion like pressing your open hands together as if to pray. Rock stars were doing it on stage, politicians were signing historic peace accords and doing the “push them together” motion, it saved the whole world