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If safety in your ideal society is entirely based on care by networks of affinity, and does not provide care for people who are not liked by anybody, then your society is actually even worse than the situation we are in now.

Pissing off people close to you or over-exhausting your social network or isolating yourself is often an inherent part of many mental health problems, addictions, etc. By the time people need care the most, they have often lost all their networks of affinity, and with some bad luck, any of us could find ourselves in that situation.

There has to be unconditional care available for the more unlikable of us, or there isn't really a safety net for any of us.

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youth liberation now! Zine series to print and distribute (all printable pdfs)

Youthlib Now! Issue #1

Youthlib Now! Issue #2

Youthlib Now! Issue #3

Youthlib Now! Issue #4

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Pay attention to the particulars of Mastercard's responses, because this a textbook example of how to create plausible deniability.

"Mastercard has not barred any legal transaction" is, technically, a true statement – because Mastercard is not the one processing the transactions in the first place. Mastercard does not deal directly with any merchant, and in fact typically refuses to communicate with merchants at all; there's always a payment processing service sitting in between Mastercard and the merchant, whether that's Stripe or Paypal or any of dozens of other service providers.

Consequently, there are two layers of service agreements in place: the agreement between Mastercard and the payment processing service, and the agreement between the payment processing service and the merchant. That second layer of service agreements, between the payment processing service and the merchant, is where all of these content restrictions are being imposed. Mastercard can thus truthfully claim that they aren't barring legal transactions.

Now, if you've been paying attention, you've probably already spotted the issue: if the content restrictions are being imposed upon the merchants by individual payment processing services and not by Mastercard, why do all of those payment processing services seem to have exactly the same content restrictions?

That's where the critical sleight of hand comes in: while Mastercard's own terms of service do not require payment processing services to bar transactions of particular types, their ToS does require payment processors to bar transactions which could be damaging to the Mastercard brand. What constitutes damage to the Mastercard brand is not defined; it means whatever Mastercard wants it to mean. The payment processing services are thus in a position where they can be held in breach of Mastercard's terms of service for basically any reason, which gives them a strong incentive not to test any boundaries.

And that's why Mastercard can truthfully say they have never barred any legal transaction: they're never the ones doing the blocking. The layer of payment processing services that sits between Mastercard and the merchants are enforcing those content restrictions, based on a series of unwritten handshake agreements between the payment processors and Mastercard regarding what does and does not constitute acceptable content – and because the particulars of those handshake agreements aren't in writing, Mastercard can assert that their terms of service do not compel payment processing services to bar any legal transaction and technically be telling the truth.

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Tens of thousands of notes on a post claiming a bill introduced by the Republicans will make credit card companies support NSFW content, and only a handful going "hey maybe don't support this".

Let's look into how the bill is being reported elsewhere - in fact, from the Senator who introduced the Senate version of the Fair Access to Banking Act

"In recent years, prominent American banks have engaged in a discriminatory practice, referred to as debanking. Banks and financial institutions use their economic standing to categorically exclude law-abiding, legal industries by refusing to lend or provide services to them."

Hmm. What industries could he mean?

"This includes industries such as firearms, ammunition, crypto, federal prison contractors, as well as energy producers."

Wow. Who could've guessed that's what he meant

“When progressives failed at banning these entire industries, what they did instead is they turned to weaponizing banks as sort of a backdoor to carry out their activist goals..."

So it is, in fact, a bill around trying to stop left-wing activists from, say, going after oil and gas companies or private prisons or the arms industry

But - surely it would include NSFW bans too, right? It would overturn them, right? If you read the text of the bill, which is deliberately vague as you'd expect, it explicitly allows banks to deny payment based on "quantitative, impartial risk-based standards" - it only bans it for "political" or "reputational risk" considerations. And claims that the adult media industry is "high risk" is why payment processors drop it

But let's see who supports it!

"The Fair Access to Banking Act is endorsed by several organizations, including the National Shooting Sports Foundation, National Rifle Association, North Dakota Petroleum Council, National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, The Digital Chamber, Blockchain Association, Independent Petroleum Association of America, Online Lenders Alliance, Day 1 Alliance, GEO Group, Lignite Energy Council, National Association of Wholesaler-Distributors, National Mining Association, CoreCivic, and the National ATM Council."

Private prison companies, fossil fuel companies, blockchain companies, and the NRA. But surely...? SURELY a bill we're explicitly told again and again is about preventing left-wing activism against private industry, that's co-sponsored by fucking Lindsey Graham, and that certainly seems to include a carve-out specifically to let payment processors continue to deny adult content, but not deny conservative political causes...would secretly be pro-NSFW content?

This bill is all over the internet now, with viral pleas to GET IT PASSED and shutdowns of any criticism of a bill whose real intent is extremely overt. All of this is a simple search away and straight from the horse's mouth, and nobody wants to do even that modicum of research because they would prefer to take someone's word for it that a magic panacea is just a few phone calls away. If you make phone calls asking for this to pass, you're being played: tricked into supporting a bill crafted by the people leading the moral panic that harassed Itch into oblivion that would do nothing to help that, but that would ban any activism against payments for destructive fossil fuel extraction or gun lobbying. The guy who made it just told everyone that's what it's for! Does no one care to look? To read the bill? You can be the one to read it and say it's bad (being the only person to actually read an odious bill is called "Russ Feingold-ing")

Looking up the talk about this bill one theme I saw a lot was people dismissing anyone pointing out a Republican introduced it by saying "I don't care who introduced it! AS LONG AS SOMEBODY DOES SOMETHING!!!!" But you know what? If you saw that a Republican introduced the bill, and your reaction was to go "wow, so a Republican introduced a bill to protect adult content?" without even a pang of skepticism...I have no words tbh

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it is kinda crazy how people simultaneously do a lot of loud worrying about csa and the nefarious pedophiles grooming their kids but then also do what should be seen as obvious preemptive sexual grooming on their own kids. the culture of “youre my kid” with an unsubtle undertone of possession and also the entitlement to children’s bodies that most parents have is like just. like when you make it clear to your kids that they have no right to bodily autonomy or that their upset over you touching them a certain way is inappropriate and not valid how are you going to expect that they then magically are able to say that those same feelings are suddenly valid when they’re caused by someone else? like so much of child raising involves such antagonistic and oftentimes physically violent forced access to children’s bodies often despite their active verbal nonconsent. and youre somehow unable to make the connection as to how this type of boundary stomping erodes someone’s ability to identify when your discomfort is “valid” vs “not valid” and how that would clearly leave someone incredibly vulnerable to sexual abuse

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In a landmark ruling, a Brussels Court today ordered the government of the Flemish region in Belgium to block a specific container carrying dual-use items to Israel and also to halt all further transit of military material to Israel for its ongoing genocide against 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza. The judge found that the Flemish government has systematically failed to uphold its legal obligations under the Genocide Convention and imposed a fine on it for each military shipment to Israel that may still go through.  The demands brought forward by BDS partners and allies — INTAL, Vredesactie, 11.11.11 and the Flemish League for Human Rights —  were upheld by the court on all counts.

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"The US could stop the genocide in Gaza tomorrow!" Yes. As the biggest weapons supplier, the US could stop the genocide. But so could the EU, and that's not getting enough attention.

Israel's economy couldn't survive without the EU, not even for a short time. The EU is Israel’s largest trading partner and the biggest investor in Israel (nearly twice as big as the United States) and the EU is the main destination for Israeli investment.

Firm economic sanctions by the EU would not be some long term pressure builder, they would have immediate effect. The EU could stop the genocide in Gaza tomorrow. They choose not to.

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As I keep shouting into the void, pathologizers love shifting discussion about material conditions into discussion about emotional states.

I rant approximately once a week about how the brain maturity myth transmuted “Young adults are too poor to move out of their parents’ homes or have children of their own” into “Young adults are too emotionally and neurologically immature to move out of their parents’ homes or have children of their own.”

I’ve also talked about the misuse of “enabling” and “trauma” and “dopamine” .

And this is a pattern – people coin terms and concepts to describe material problems, and pathologization culture shifts them to be about problems in the brain or psyche of the person experiencing them. Now we’re talking about neurochemicals, frontal lobes, and self-esteem instead of talking about wages, wealth distribution, and civil rights. Now we can say that poor, oppressed, and exploited people are suffering from a neurological/emotional defect that makes them not know what’s best for themselves, so they don’t need or deserve rights or money.

Here are some terms that have been so horribly misused by mental health culture that we’ve almost entirely forgotten that they were originally materialist critiques.

Codependency What it originally referred to: A non-addicted person being overly “helpful” to an addicted partner or relative, often out of financial desperation. For example: Making sure your alcoholic husband gets to work in the morning (even though he’s an adult who should be responsible for himself) because if he loses his job, you’ll lose your home. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/08/opinion/codependency-addiction-recovery.html What it’s been distorted into: Being “clingy,” being “too emotionally needy,” wanting things like affection and quality time from a partner. A way of pathologizing people, especially young women, for wanting things like love and commitment in a romantic relationship.

Compulsory Heterosexuality What it originally referred to: In the 1980 in essay "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence," https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/493756 Adrienne Rich described compulsory heterosexuality as a set of social conditions that coerce women into heterosexual relationships and prioritize those relationships over relationships between women (both romantic and platonic). She also defines “lesbian” much more broadly than current discourse does, encompassing a wide variety of romantic and platonic relationships between women. While she does suggest that women who identify as heterosexual might be doing so out of unquestioned social norms, this is not the primary point she’s making. What it’s been distorted into: The patronizing, biphobic idea that lesbians somehow falsely believe themselves to be attracted to men. Part of the overall “Women don’t really know what they want or what’s good for them” theme of contemporary discourse.

Emotional Labor What it originally referred to: The implicit or explicit requirement that workers (especially women workers, especially workers in female-dominated “pink collar” jobs, especially tipped workers) perform emotional intimacy with customers, coworkers, and bosses above and beyond the actual job being done. Having to smile, be “friendly,” flirt, give the impression of genuine caring, politely accept harassment, etc. https://weld.la.psu.edu/what-is-emotional-labor/ What it’s been distorted into: Everything under the sun. Everything from housework (which we already had a term for), to tolerating the existence of disabled people, to just caring about friends the way friends do. The original intent of the concept was “It’s unreasonable to expect your waitress to care about your problems, because she’s not really your friend,” not “It’s unreasonable to expect your actual friends to care about your problems unless you pay them, because that’s emotional labor,” and certainly not “Disabled people shouldn’t be allowed to be visibly disabled in public, because witnessing a disabled person is emotional labor.” Anything that causes a person emotional distress, even if that emotional distress is rooted in the distress-haver’s bigotry (Many nominally progressive people who would rightfully reject the bigoted logic of “Seeing gay or interracial couples upsets me, which is emotional labor, so they shouldn’t be allowed to exist in public” fully accept the bigoted logic of “Seeing disabled or poor people upsets me, which is emotional labor, so they shouldn’t be allowed to exist in public”).

Battered Wife Syndrome What it originally referred to: The all-encompassing trauma and fear of escalating violence experienced by people suffering ongoing domestic abuse, sometimes resulting in the abuse victim using necessary violence in self-defense. Because domestic abuse often escalates, often to murder, this fear is entirely rational and justified. This is the reasonable, justified belief that someone who beats you, stalks you, and threatens to kill you may actually kill you.

What it’s been distorted into: Like so many of these other items, the idea that women (in this case, women who are victims of domestic violence) don’t know what’s best for themselves. I debated including this one, because “syndrome” was a wrongful framing from the beginning – a justified and rational fear of escalating violence in a situation in which escalating violence is occurring is not a “syndrome.” But the original meaning at least partially acknowledged the material conditions of escalating violence.

I’m not saying the original meanings of these terms are ones I necessarily agree with – as a cognitive liberty absolutist, I’m unsurprisingly not that enamored of either second-wave feminism or 1970s addiction discourse. And as much as I dislike what “emotional labor” has become, I accept that “Women are unfairly expected to care about other people’s feelings more than men are” is a true statement.

What I am saying is that all of these terms originally, at least partly, took material conditions into account in their usage. Subsequent usage has entirely stripped the materialist critique and fully replaced it with emotional pathologization, specifically of women. Acknowledgement that women have their choices constrained by poverty, violence, and oppression has been replaced with the idea that women don’t know what’s best for themselves and need to be coercively “helped” for their own good. Acknowledgement that working-class women experience a gender-and-class-specific form of economic exploitation has been rebranded as yet another variation of “Disabled people are burdensome for wanting to exist.”

Over and over, materialist critiques are reframed as emotional or cognitive defects of marginalized people. The next time you hear a superficially sympathetic (but actually pathologizing) argument for “Marginalized people make bad choices because…” consider stopping and asking: “Wait, who are we to assume that this person’s choices are ‘bad’? And if they are, is there something about their material conditions that constrains their options or makes the ‘bad’ choice the best available option?”

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it is funny when people act as though no transitional program for family abolition exists when cuba’s family code is right there

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we shouldn't overlook how gender plays a role in the fact that it has been largely immigrant men being kidnapped and imprisoned, how patriarchal views on maleness is fundamental to the racist fearmongering around immigrant criminality and violence towards specifically white citizen women & girls. just as much as patriarchy is always a factor in how society interacts with people seen as women, it is always a factor with people seen as men. labeling all immigrant men as violent gang members looking to rape and murder white american girls is gendered racism & xenophobia. this is just as much patriarchy in action as anything relating to birth control and abortion and trans healthcare. patriarchy has always sought to enslave & kill marginalized men.

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THE FUCKING ICE REPORT AAAAAAAAAAA

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posts about the alt-right pipeline being compassionate towards young men while radical leftists shun and shame them are not fucking saying "the men are becoming violent because feminists are too mean!" and if that is your takeaway you need to get off tumblr until you've better honed your critical thinking skills.

those posts are talking about how effective the language and approach you take in your activism can be. this is literally cult deprogramming 101. if someone is being taken in by a violent or dangerous group, that violent or dangerous group is usually offering them compassion and solace while working hard to convince them everyone else in the world is their enemy. you are under no obligation to coddle or act compassionate toward these men and their violent ideologies, but if you have the means to try, it is something that you can do to make a tangible difference.

radicalized people are often only one loving friend or family member or external voice away from being de-radicalized. of course that is not always the case, but it very often is. a lot of y'all rightfully understand that you do not carry the burden of being that voice, but a lot of y'all also have a lot of internalized ideas about morals and punitive justice and have simply written off these people as deserving of only the worst and not worth saving.

ten years ago, my grandmother was a fox news watching republican who voted red in every election and very well could have fallen down the qanon rabbit hole if not for me and her daughter challenging her compassionately, walking her through hypotheticals that validated her feelings & proving why they were false, & being patient with her despite our extreme division in political ideology. it was frustrating fucking work! but i decided i wanted to do it, because i could see the horizon and i could see me making a difference!

"misogynists have been saying feminists are too mean for years, get new material" that is not the fucking POINT. the point is that you, feminist, can be the compassionate voice that guides your brother, your father, your cousin, your grandfather away from fucking becoming or staying a nazi. you can show them compassion and companionship. you can be the woman they think of when their alt-right bros try to convince them that women are the enemy. and you can choose to crystallize that image of yourself so wholly in their mind's eye as worth protecting that they may very well choose to reject those harmful ideas.

it's not saying you HAVE to do it! it's saying you CAN do it! don't you 'firebomb a walmart' people all love taking change into your own hands? where the fuck is that energy right now, huh?

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Worst part of popular left wing AI discourse online is that there's absolutely a need for a robust leftist opposition to use of cognitive automation without social dispensation to displaced human workers. The lack of any prior measures to facilitate a transition to having fewer humans in the workplace (UBI, more public control over industrial infrastructure, etc) is a disaster we are sleepwalking into - one that could lock the majority of our society's wealth further into the hands of authoritarian oligarchs who retain control of industry through last century private ownership models, while no longer needing to rely on us to operate their property.

But now we're seemingly not going to have the opposition we so desperately need, because everyone involved in the anti-AI conversation has pretty thoroughly discredited themselves and their movement by harbouring unconstrained reactionary nonsense, blatant falsehoods and woo. Instead of talking about who owns and benefits from cognitive automation, people are:

Demanding impossibilities like uninventing a now readily accessible technology

Trying to ascribe implicit moral value to said technology instead of the who is using it and how

Siding with corporations on copyright law in the name of "defending small artists"

Repeating obvious and embarrassing technical misconceptions and erroneous pop-sci about machine learning in order to justify their preferred philosophy

Invoking neo-spiritual conservative woo about the specialness of the human soul to try to incoherently discredit a machine that can quite obviously perform certain tasks just as well if not better than they can

Misrepresent numbers about energy use and environmental cost in an absurd double standard (all modern infrastructure is reliant on data centers to a similar level of impact, including your favourite fandom social media and online video games!) to build a narrative AI is some sort of malevolent spirit that damages our reality when it is called upon

It's a level of reactionary ignorance that has completely discredited any popular opposition to industrial AI rollout because it falls apart as soon as you dig deeper than a snappy social media post, or a misguided pro-copyright screed from an insecure web artist (who decries a machine laying eyes on their freely posted work while simultaneously charging commission for fan-art of corporate IPs... I'm sure that will absolutely resolve in their favour).

It would be funny how much people are fucking themselves over with all this, except I'm being fucked over to, and as a result am really quite mad about the situation. We need UBI, we need to liberate abundance from corporate greed, what we don't need is viral posts about putting distortion filters on anime fan-art to ward off the evil mechanical eye, pointless boycotts of platforms because they are perceived to have let the evil machines taint them, or petitions to further criminalize the creation of derivative works.

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this australian guy wrote about the columbia protests when he was a student here. he hid his substack and deleted his social media apps before he went on a trip back to the US to visit friends. he was detained, interrogated extensively about palestine by two border patrol agents, then deported back to australia.

^ that's a quick summary he wrote after the experience. the longer new yorker article is really jarring. link without paywall here

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the summer of 2020 should have been a very instructive time in USAmerican politics for many people, because Democrat politicians collaborated hand in hand with term 1 Trump (the guy they had pretended to hate so viciously for years leading up to 2020 and have pretended to hate since) with the specific purpose of repressing an anti-racist protest movement and preserving policing. All these Democrat mayors and governors and senators went on and on about preserving the rule of law, and about how the protestors were going too far, and they called in the National Guard to brutally put them down. A handful of them feigned some support for the protests, and then as soon as they came into power, they immediately dropped all support and funding for police department across the USA dramatically increased. This was all also immediately followed by a whole new wave of Democrat branded denial of the covid crisis, a new war in Ukraine, and then the genocide in Palestine. None of this is ancient history, unless you were born in like 2010 or don't live in the USA this all should be pretty fresh in your memory, yet somehow the events of that summer have seemingly already been forgotten by so many people as if they were just a momentary dream

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Radical perfectionism and paranoid reading

This tendency for constant evaluation and the imposition of external standards has percolated its way into many facets of life under Empire. It exists even among radicals: what changes is merely the kind of standards and the mode of evaluation. Is it radical? Is it anarchist? Is it critical? Is it revolutionary? Is it anti-oppressive? How might it be co-opted, complicit, or flawed? What is problematic? What does it fail to do? How limited, ineffective, and short-lived is it? Margaret Killjoy spoke to us about the ways that these tendencies can pervade anarchist spaces:

While I think there’s a decent bit of spontaneity and not-making-rules and such going on in radicalism, I see an awful lot less creativity at the moment. Particularly, I see very little creativity from tactical, strategic, and even theoretical analysis … For a bunch of anarchists, we’re remarkably uncomfortable with new ideas. If I were to hazard a guess, I would say that happens because we’ve really honed our ability to critique things but not our ability to embrace things.[167]

Applied incessantly, critique can become a reflex that forces out other capacities. The queer theorist Eve Sedgwick argues that this penchant for constant critique runs through many currents of radical thought, in what she calls paranoid reading.[168] Paranoid reading is based on a stance of suspicion: an attempt to avoid co-optation or mistakes through constant vigilance. It seeks to ward off bad surprises by ensuring that oppression and violence are already known, or at least anticipated, so that one will not be caught off guard, and so that one can react to the first sign of trouble. The result is that one is always on guard and never surprised. By approaching everything with detached suspicion, one closes off the capacity to be affected in new ways.

When we interviewed Richard Day, he suggested that this tendency is linked to being in pain and converting that pain into an incessant search for lack:

In general, I think rigid radicalism is a response to feeling really hurt and fucked up. And the real enemy is the dominant order, but it gets mixed into this big soup, so the enemy becomes each other. It becomes oneself. It’s a finding lacking as such … a finding lacking almost everywhere with almost everyone. And when that lack is found, then of course there needs to be some action: which is going to be to tell, or force, or coerce, or get at that lack, and try to turn it into a wholeness. So strangely enough I’d suggest that rigid radicalism is driven by a desire to heal. And it has exactly the opposite effect: of sundering the self more, of sundering communities more, and so on.[169]

Those of us who regularly find ourselves in pain might find this paradox familiar. Through the constant imposition of external standards, everything can be found lacking, and all kinds of coercive responses can seem justified. An endless cycle ensues: no one and nothing is good enough, and this paranoid stance constantly incapacitates exploration, healing, and affirmation.

Many of us learn this mode of thought through university, or through immersion in radical spaces themselves: we learn to search for, anticipate, and point out the pervasiveness of Empire. Even without the sad rigor of the Weather Underground, we learn to search the bodies, behaviors, and words of others for any shred of complicity. Mik Turje spoke to this tendency when we interviewed them:

I think as a youth I was really idealistic, and I came to the university context, and critical theory, where idealism and imagining something better was stamped out as something naïve. The only option was to master the hypercritical language myself, and one-upping people. I got really good at that. I won all of the political arguments in school, but … I was being a shitbag of a militant, tearing everyone down.[170]

By being immersed in paranoid reading, people learn to find themselves and others lacking. Having been “educated,” one becomes a pedagogue oneself, spreading the word about Empire, oppression, and violence, and in the process one tends to position others as naïve and ignorant.

This is clear in how surprise and curiosity are often infantilized by Empire. They are treated as foolish or “childish”—that is, lacking the educated, rational, civilized, adult capacities of detached evaluation. Paranoid reading and its association with adulthood and rational detachment are transmitted through schooling, founded on patriarchal white supremacy. Based on suspicion, perfectionism, and the penchant for finding flaws in ourselves and others, paranoid reading prevents us from being joyfully in touch with the world and with the always already present potential for transformation.

Crucially, paranoid reading and lack-finding have their own affective ecology, with their own pleasures and rewards. There can be a sense of satisfaction in being the one who anticipates or exposes inadequacy. There can be safety and comfort in a paranoid stance, because it helps ensure that we already know what to do with new encounters. Incessantly exposing flaws can be pleasurable, and can even become a source of belonging.

We think this is at the heart of what destroys the transformative potential of movements from within: the capacity for paranoid reading closes off the capacity to embrace and be embraced by new things. The stance of detached judgment means remaining at a distance from what is taking place. In contrast, experimentation requires openness and vulnerability, including the risk of being caught off guard or hurt. From a paranoid perspective, things like gratitude, celebration, curiosity, and openness are naïve at best, and potentially dangerous. When everything is anticipated, or one can see immediately how something is imperfect or lacking, one misses the capacity to be affected and moved.