#and even if there isn’t a clear ‘historical relevance’ it can have individual resonance to sooo many people

[vohannesvotrov]

tbqh there is no genre that is bad!!! like. it’s fine if a given genre of media isn’t for u but just b/c u don’t like it doesn’t mean it is bad - there are depths to this genre that you’ll never know & it’s so myopic to just write it off as “bad”. this shit isn’t a dichotomy - it is possible to think something like “hm this genre isn’t for me but it’s filled with talented artists & it has been a cultural landmark throughout history” and just move the fuck on!!!!! you’ll be better for it i prommy

[loveanimalstory-blog]

Tigers Don’t Eat Humans, So Why Did This One Kill Over 400 People?

In the first decade of the 20th century, the foremost prolific serial murderer of human life the planet has ever seen stalked the foothills of the Himalayas. A serial murderer that wasn't merely content to kidnap victims in the dark and dismember their bodies, but also insisted on eating their flesh. A serial murderer that, for the higher a part of ten years, eluded police, bounty hunters, assassins, and even a whole regiment of Nepalese Gurkhas. A serial murderer that happened to be a Royal Bengal tiger. Specifically, a tiger referred to as the Man-Eater of Champawat. much more than an apex predator that occasionally included humans in its diet, it had been an animal that—for reasons that wouldn’t become apparent until its killing spree was over—explicitly regarded our species as a primary source of food. And thereto end, this brazen tiger Tigris hunted Homo sapiens on a daily basis across the rugged borderlands of Nepal and India within the early 1900s with shocking impunity and an almost supernatural efficacy. within the end, its reported tally added up to 436 human souls—more, some belief than the other individual killer, man or animal, before or since. Despite its unusual appetites and hunting prowess, however, surprisingly little has been written about the Champawat. And when the odd mention of the tiger does happen, it's more often than not as a curious footnote to a broader article on human-tiger conflict, or as a gory little bit of trivia from The Guinness Book of World Records. the very fact that one tiger was ready to take such an immense human toll over such an extended period of your time is never presented as a topic that deserves historical scrutiny or academic study. It looks like an honest story, and zip more. And admittedly, it's a fine story, and it's tempting to present it simply intrinsically. it's universal in its appeal and almost literary in its Beowulfian dimensions: a man-eating creature that terrorizes the countryside, repeatedly evading capture, until a hero appears who is brave enough to trace it straight to its lair. it's a timeless campfire tale, simple and hair-raising within the way all such yarns must be. Who wouldn’t want to listen to a story like that? One that speaks to the foremost primal and deeply ingrained of all human fears? But there's another story to be told here also, and while certainly hair-raising, it's anything but simple. The events that transpired within the forests and valleys of the Himalayan foothills within the first decade of the 20th century weren't a series of bizarre aberrations. They were actually the inevitable results of the tremendous cultural and ecological conflicts that were shaking the region—indeed, the world—at that point, affecting man and animal alike in unlikely ways, and throwing age-old systems chaotically out of whack. faraway from some pulp fiction tale of man versus nature or good versus evil, the story of the Champawat is richer and far more complex, with protagonists at odds with even themselves. Beginning, of course, with the particular tiger. Bengal tigers don't under normal circumstances kill or eat humans. they're naturally semi-nocturnal, deep-forest predators with a seemingly ingrained fear of all things bipedal; they're animals which will generally change direction at the primary sign of a person's instead of seeking an aggressive confrontation. Yet at the turn of the 20th century, a change so profound and upsetting to the universe was occurring in Nepal and India on cause one such tiger to not only lose its inborn fear of humans altogether but to start hunting them in their homes on an about weekly basis—a tragedy for the quite four hundred individuals who would eventually fall victim to its teeth and claws. This tiger ceased to behave sort of a tiger in the least, in important respects, and transformed into a replacement quite creature about unknown within the hills of northern India’s Kumaon district, prowling around villages and stalking men and ladies in broad daylight. Then there's Corbett, the now-legendary hunter who was finally commissioned by the British government to finish the Champawat Tiger’s reign. To many, even in present-day India, he's nothing in need of a secular saint, a brave and selfless figure who risked life and limb to defend poor villagers when nobody else would. To others, particularly academics engaged with post-colonial ecologies, he's just another perpetrator of the Eurocentric paternalism that defined the colonial experience. Each may be a fair judgment. The whole truth, however, is way more nuanced, together would expect when it involves a deeply conflicted man whose life spanned eras, generations, and eventually even empires. Corbett was a prolific sportsman who, upon achieving fame, hobnobbed with aristocrats and used tiger hunts to curry their favor. But he was also a tireless advocate for wild tigers and devoted the latter a part of his life to their conservation—as evidenced by the sprawling and luxurious park in India that bears his name to the present day. Yes, he did come to enjoy the trimmings and privileges of English sahib, servants and sport shooting and social clubs included. But because of the domiciled son of an Irish postmaster, foreign-born and thought of socially inferior, he was also keenly conscious of what it meant to be colonized—by the very people he enabled and admired. And he did love India, in particular, its people, even while playing an unwitting part within the nation’s subjugation. Which brings us, inevitably, to colonialism itself—a topic far too broad and multifaceted for any single book, including one that’s concerned primarily with man-eating tigers. Yet it's colonialism, undeniably, and therefore the onslaught of environmental destruction that it almost universally heralds, that served because of the primary catalyst within the creation of our man-eater. it's going to are a poacher’s bullet in Nepal that first turned the Champawat Tiger upon our kind, but it had been a full century of disastrous ecological mismanagement within the Indian subcontinent that drove it out of the wild forests and grasslands it should have called home and allowed it to become the prodigious killer that it had been. What becomes clear upon closer historical examination is that the Champawat wasn't an event of nature gone awry—it was actually a man-made disaster. From Valmik Thapar to Corbett himself, any tiger wallah could tell you the varied factors which will turn a traditional tiger into a man-eater: a disabling wound or infirmity, a loss of prey species, or degradation of natural habitat. within the case of the Champawat, however, we discover not only one but all three of those factors to be irrefutably present. Essentially, by the late nineteenth century, British within the United Provinces of northern India and their Rana dynasty counterparts in western Nepal had created, through a mixture of irresponsible forestry tactics, agricultural policies, and hunting practices, the perfect conditions for an ecological catastrophe. And it had been the type of catastrophe we will still find whiffs of today, be it within the recent spate of shark attacks in Réunion Island, the increase of human-wolf conflict on the outskirts of Yellowstone, or maybe the man-eating tigers that still appear in places just like the Sundarbans forest of India or Nepal’s Chitwan park. within the modern-day, we've eventually, thankfully, come to understand the importance of apex predators in maintaining the health of our ecosystems—but we’re still negotiating, somewhat painfully, how best to measure alongside them. And that’s to mention nothing of the much more sweeping problems posed by heating and mass extinction, exigencies that have arisen from considerably an equivalent amalgamation of economic mismanagement and environmental destruction. Apex predators are generally considered bellwethers of the general health of the environment, and at the present, with carbon emissions on the increase and natural habitats diminishing, the outlook for both feels disarmingly uncertain. This is why this particular story of environmental conflict isn't only relevant, but urgent and necessary. At its core, Jim Corbett’s quest to rid the valleys of Kumaon of the Champawat Tiger is dramatic and easy, but the tensions that underscore it contain the resonance of much larger and more grievous issues. Yes, it's a timeless tale of cunning and courage, but also a lesson, still considerably pertinent today, about how deforestation, industrialization, and colonization can upset the delicate balance of cultures and ecosystems alike, creating unseen pressures that, at a particular point, must find their release. Sometimes even within the sort of a man-eating tiger.

[utopianparadoxist]

(1/3)Let me start by saying that I absolutely love your essays on the classpect system, after reading them I felt I was seeing Homestuck in an entirely new light. In fact, it’s because of this that I wanted to run an idea I’ve had about a certain classpect by you. That classpect being Seer of Blood. For the longest time, I considered just how this particular combination would actually work.

(2/3)We know that the Seer class experiences visions of the future through the vector of their aspect(or perhaps guided by their aspect), and this is clearly demonstrated by Terezi seeing the future as the myriads of choices the players can make while Rose seems to be capable of seeing the “true” path or the most fortunate path. So how could the Blood aspect, or rather bonds, be used to see the future?(3/3)I thought about what a bond really was, and realized that a bond is simply the accumulation of shared memories and experiences between individuals, in other words a shared past. Then I remembered Signless, the visions that prompted him to start the revolution were of Beforus, of the past. I think that rather than being a pre-cog like other Seers, a Seer of Blood is actually a post-cog who uses their visions to empathize with their players and unite them.

1) Thank you so much! I’m really glad you liked them, and I hope we go on to learn a lot more about the system together :D I’m sure I’m wrong about some stuff and I’m sure there’s more to learn--it’s part of why I’m so excited for Hiveswap!2) Yeah, I’d say I more or less agree! The only point I’d differ on is that I don’t think Terezi and Rose are specifically Pre-Cogs, and I don’t think a Seer of Blood is necessarily a Post-Cog, though the Sufferer certainly experiences his powers that way. I’d say all types of Seers could likely develop both properties.I say this because time simply isn’t linear in Homestuck at all. Hypothetically, if none of the seers had any limits on their power, then for the Sufferer remembering past bonds would inevitably lead him from Beforus to LE, and from LE to the Alpha kids, from the Alpha kids to the Betas, and back around--though obviously, as his focus is Blood, he seems to cap out with the Beforans.But even that’s more complicated, because the Sufferer isn’t technically remembering the past, but rather an alternate timeline/universe entirely, isn’t he? We saw it with the kids: The beta kid and alpha kid timelines are actually mostly concurrent to one another, despite the fact that the Betas created the Alpha’s timeline. Jake and Jade grow up loosely in tandem.So whether they’re inclined to remember moments related to the future or to the past, what it seems to me all Seers are mostly able to do is see sideways--into other universes, other timelines. That makes the concept of pre- or post- cognition tricky, because different universes’ temporal envelopes are wholly irrelevant to one another’s.Terezi distributes some pretty remarkable recollection of her own timeline and the results of changing it at various points, which seems technically post-cog? Though again we fall into that timeline ambiguity. And while it’s not in canon exactly, it seems easy for me to imagine pre-cog showing up for a Seer of Blood--seeing someone and instantly knowing you’ll be friends or lovers, for example? That kind of thing.anyway none of this is to say you’re wrong at all. It’s definitely correct that the Sufferer has a heavy disposition towards elements of reality that, through various vague and complex mechanics, read as “Past” events from his perspective. I just find the Time mechanics in Homestuck irresistible to think about because they’re so fucking weird x3. I also just don’t want to imply that anything about my view of the Classpects implies any Class ever has to “just” be X or Y, you know? I don’t even think the archetypes I claim the story puts forth for the class pairs work that way, which is something I’ve been thinking about and needing to clarify for a long time because I’m worried I haven’t been clear enough about it. So let’s get into this tangent for a minute, if you’ll indulge me. Maid/Sylphs as Fairies, for example. I do think it’s definitely true those classes are coded that way in the story of Homestuck, and that they flesh out our understanding of what their key verb means, and so what they can do/how they think and process reality. Now, does that mean all True Maid/Sylph OCs, in my view, should parse themselves in terms of fairies? No, I don’t think so. I think Homestuck uses the symbol logic of fairies to clue the reader in, but there are myriad ways you could use mythology--or simply narrative-- to get to the concept of a Player creating their Aspect or being made of it or both. It would be just as evocative and powerful, in my view, to base a “Maker” informed by the mythological idea of Creator Goddesses, or even a specific creator goddess. You could go with Summon Spirits from JRPGs, who embody many of the same tropes of elementals while being a bit distanced from the idea of fairy-dom. You could get more specific. It would be pretty easy to imagine a Fairy class Hope player who literally becomes or already is an Angel--they’re Made of Faith, after all. The classpects are hyperflexible, and I like the Unifying Myth concept because it gives us handy ways to interpret any individual member of a given classpect to specificity. Or, of course, you can use no unifying myth or broad historical archetype at all, or make up your own consistent worldbuilding for whatever you’re thinking of making.To personalize and flesh out the character by drawing on archetypes and mythology outside of the base Classpect system in order to give resonance and meaning to the classpect that is relevant to that specific character, the way furries work for Jade or Trolls for Callie or Rainbow Drinkers for Kanaya or so on.So I definitely think The Sufferer reads strongly as a Post-Cog. I’m way more hesitant to allow myself to say a phrase like “Seer of Blood is post-cog”, though, because I’m unnervingly aware people might be starting to give a shit what I have to say? And I absolutely never, ever want to be limiting. A Seer of Blood can and will be anything. The only limit is what kind of story you want to tell with one, and how much thought and nuance to want to put into the telling of it. Homestuck gives you a lot of tools to build the same kind of compelling nuance it does itself in your own storytelling, that’s all.Sorry if I’m rambling! I wasn’t expecting to come out with this right now, and I’m sure there are more elegant and coherent ways of saying it, but I really felt like I needed to get this out there. Thanks for giving me the chance and sorry for the wall of text!

[flipfundingstuff]

Improve Your Communications, Improve Your Inclusivity

Demographics in the United States are diversifying with each passing year. More importantly, our understanding of and focus on inclusivity is growing. That means many of the phrases and jokes of the past are no longer acceptable. The adverse reactions these sayings can cause are nothing new, but it’s no longer socially acceptable to cause harm in the name of thoughtless attempts at humor.

The way we talk to others is a representation of our character, so any business that wants to be known for values needs to ensure their communications reinforce them. You can paste all manner of inspirational mantras on your walls, but if your leaders use crass “bro” talk around employees, you’ll lose all credibility.

“An inclusive work environment doesn’t just happen; it requires sustained effort,” says an inclusivity report from McKinsey. “Stresses from COVID-19 and extended isolation are driving a range of negative emotions in employees. On top of that, recent prominent examples of racial injustice have affected many employees in ways that cannot be left behind when work begins. This is especially true for Black employees. While the systemic nature of racism demands systemic action, individual actions are an important part of supporting employees and ensuring they can continue to make meaningful contributions.”

It’s clear that any improvements need to start at the top. You and your leaders should speak openly and often about how you can set an example for inclusive communications. You’ll also need to decide how you’ll deal with those who fail to live up to your company’s standards.

Inclusivity Is Good for Business (and the Soul)

There are obviously ethical reasons for using inclusive speech. When we target or isolate others with our language, we often cause substantial damage. Over time, these offenses pile up to the point that self-esteem is destroyed and trust becomes impossible.

Treating others fairly and respectfully requires empathy. Using this powerful relationship tool, we can improve our actions not because we have to, but because we want to. Understanding the way other people are impacted is an essential part of becoming better versions of ourselves. It allows us to step out of our self-serving world, which inevitably brings personal growth and happiness.

But inclusivity isn’t merely a heartwarming topic—it can also have a direct impact on your bottom line. Research shows that businesses that effectively incorporate diversity “are 35% more likely to have financial returns above their respective national industry medians.”

When your business embraces diversity and inclusivity, those positive values emanate into the world. People value authenticity so much more than the aforementioned “words on the wall,” so your actions will attract employees, partners, and customers.

Benefits that come from a diversified business team include better retention, broader range of perspectives, stronger internal culture, better engagement with the community, and the kind of brand loyalty that you read about in business books.

Some Phrases That Need to Go

You might be wondering if parts of your speech are potentially offensive. Well, you guys, I have some great advice that’ll help you speak in a way that’s respectful to all mankind. In case you didn’t notice, that previous sentence has a couple of issues. First off, “you guys” is a gender-specific phrase that can be offensive to some groups. Likewise, the word “mankind” is another unnecessarily gender-specific term.

Let’s try that again: Don’t worry, everyone, I have some great advice that’ll help you speak in a way that’s respectful to all humankind. To improve the inclusivity in your communications, consider ditching:

Sports analogies: While they’re effective expressions for those who enjoy and understand sports, these types of analogies are relics of the male-dominated business world that has alienated other groups for centuries. You might not think there’s anything wrong with telling your team that a certain situation calls for a “full-court press,” but if even one person is left unsure of what you meant, why wouldn’t you want to use a more accessible phrase?

Gender-specific terms: As noted above, our language is replete with phrases that single out a specific gender. For every self-promoting term such as “chairman,” “foreman,” or “spokesman,” there’s a female-disparaging idiom such as “old wives’ tale.” By adjusting our speech to apply to everyone in the room, we’ll show the scope of our sincerity.

Exclusionary idioms: Some idioms, such as the aforementioned “old wives’ tale,” are tied to historic prejudices and should be rejected on moral grounds. But another issue arises with local idioms that will only be understood by those who have ties to the region. Make an effort to communicate in a way that will resonate with your entire team, regardless of where they grew up.

Disability-related terms: Whether it’s referring to someone as “deaf” because they didn’t hear what you said or saying that something is “retarded,” there’s a multitude of non-inclusive (and despicable) terms that must be purged from a successful business environment. A good rule of thumb is to imagine how you’d feel if a family member had a certain disability, then only speak in a way that you’d be comfortable with.

Insensitive words about the LGBTQ+ community: This is one of the most historically underrepresented communities in our country. Terms such as “tomboy,” “gay agenda,” or “she-male” are offensive, outdated, and just plain inaccurate. Educate yourself so that you can communicate in a way that incorporates the LGBTQ+ community, rather than push them further away.

While it’s easy to relate to the friends and family we grew up with, it can sometimes be challenging to know the best terminology for more diverse settings. There are a couple of ground rules that can help alleviate any unintended offenses. First, only highlight differences when relevant and necessary. Second, if you’re unsure of what terms to use, ask someone who would know.

As you strive to eliminate labels and broaden your reach, your business will become the type of place that people respect. You may not get every conversation right, but it will be obvious that your heart is in the right place.

The post Improve Your Communications, Improve Your Inclusivity appeared first on Lendio.

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[clubofinfo]

Expert: Should publishing neonazi material be tolerated among anarchists? To almost every anarchist the answer is and has always been no. This is not a matter of censoring or hiding from ideas, it’s a matter of not giving shitty people with shitty values and goals the legitimacy of a platform and connection with us. Social association matters, it maps networks of trust and collaboration, it declares degrees of affinity, and provides points of entry. When you hang with nazis, when you allow them into your spaces, or when you promote their propaganda you’re quite reasonably gonna get treated like a nazi collaborator. The world is not a formless and consequenceless forum for the airing and interplay of ideas. It’s particularly sad that — in the drama surrounding Little Black Cart publishing the defacto English-language mouthpeice of a terrorist group targeting anarchists — anyone should have to point out to self-proclaimed “post-anarchists” the limits of the “marketplace of ideas” notion and the dangerousness of privileging the pretense of civil dialog. Ideas rise to prominence for lots of reasons, their evolutionary fitness in a given context is not solely or often even chiefly determined by their epistemic value. When more rational or accurate ideas win out they often do so only very slowly, laboriously tearing down vast edifices of bullshit that can be raised quickly. Nationalism is fucking stupid, but nationalist propaganda is particularly effective — it’s simplistic resonance persuades faster than critique can keep pace. It hooks into our shallow monkey brain instincts, feeding off our worst desires for status, power, belonging, and community, and providing an excuse to shrink the circle of our concern for others and avoid all the fatiguing intellectual responsibility such empathy brings. While we waste time critiquing its lies and misdirection nationalism happily continues building an army and preparing to crush us. This doesn’t mean that we should expunge nationalist appeals from the historical record or make them totally inaccessible — epistemic closure is dangerous and it’s important to understand our enemies — but we shouldn’t make their dissemination easy, and we shouldn’t help in giving them slick packaging, prominence, and legitimacy. Since nationalism primarily recruits not through reason but through displays of social positioning and brute force — displays that promise power and demonstrate how much can be gotten away with — dialog is often a trap. Almost everyone gets this. An esoteric text dump online is different than something gilded in book form. The role of a publisher — even more so in the era of the internet — is to give social prominence to certain things. To leverage social and financial capital to disseminate something and lend legitimacy to it. Anarchists don’t publish flat earth nuts or climate change deniers because those perspectives have simply nothing in common with anarchism; they are not relevant or coherent with or even arguably reconcilable with anarchy. And while there is immense space for complexity, novelty, exploration, and contention within anarchism it is not yet so undermined as a concept as to be infinitely expansive. There are boundaries and a core locus of concern with the liberation of all. We certainly don’t publish neonazis or tankies. It doesn’t matter that Mao was once an anarchist or that Mussolini ran in anarchist circles — they were clearly at fundamental odds with the anarchist project. But even those genocidal ideologies pale before the mass murderous ideology of ITS, who have even more stridently sought to embrace the opposite of anarchism. Rejecting the defining anarchist goal of liberation for all, ITS derides this as “humanist” and “moralist” — valorizing instead the murder of strangers for sport. Instead of freedom and the abolition of domination, they’ve devolved into worshiping a silly macho “wildness” that’s just decentralized domination with some residual environmentalist affectations and a laughable cloak of subalternity. Once upon a time it was possible to quibble that their ideology shouldn’t be taken seriously as a declaration of intent. That the entire philosophy was self-evidently empty posturing by edgelords. And that when some brats declare that they want to kill all humans or that they’re “worse than Hitler” the extremity of such statements revealed their insincerity. But ITS’ attacks on anarchists, children’s hospitals, students, hikers, etc. long ago made such continued deflection impossible. The Journal Atassa’s website is filled with translations of ITS communiques and interviews — Atassa has effectively operated as ITS’ press office in the anglosphere. That Little Black Cart would seek to publish Atassa as a journal and insert it in anarchist spaces follows the same trajectory of assisted entryism that has led to ITS communiques being repeatedly published on AnarchistNews.org, hosted on TheAnarchistLibrary.org, read aloud enthusiastically on Free Radical Radio, laughed about approvingly on The Brilliant, etc. All from the influence of roughly the same circle of self declared nihilists. Let’s be clear that Little Black Cart’s defense of their publication of Atassa in terms of whether “calls to action” are present in the print version of Atassa is as absolutely and transparently ridiculous a defense as could be imagined. Whether a while nationalist journal makes “calls to action” is completely irrelevant. A neonazi text that speaks in airy abstract terms and avoids making a direct call to exterminate is in no real sense different than a neonazi text that lets slip such calls. This distinction is purely a legal artifice and one that should be largely irrelevant to anarchists. We all know this game intimately because we’ve played it continually over the last few decades when struggling with the liberal legal regime. The ELF had cells and the press office, legally distinct entities, but functioning as a single whole. Such positioning may save someone from prison but no anarchist actually buys that they’re ultimately distinct, they are but different organs within the same movement or project. What’s intolerable about white nationalism isn’t merely its specific acts of violence, it’s the fucking white nationalism itself. Similarly what is intolerable about ITS isn’t merely their violent acts but their fucking values and goals. The violent acts are merely proof that they are actually serious about their vile ideology — even if they have not as of yet figured out how to for example sabotage nuclear plants and kill at a larger scale. LBC contextualizes their publication of Atassa with, “The ideas we wish to publish are visionary, world-wrecking, ideas about a passionate, critical, fiery anarchy unleashed upon the world.” And similar statements have repeatedly been made across AnarchistNews.org and associated media projects — framing ITS as anarchist. But there is no sliver of anarchy to be found in ITS unless we are now — after years of attempted twisting and corruption — to accept a notion of anarchy as merely ANY fiery world-wrecking. ITS does not seek to end domination and expand freedom, the wildness they worship might as well be called fractured fascism. Broadly contiguous with and reflective of the sort of “national anarchists” that have cropped up among modern fascists with a decentralization fetish. The same almost sociopathic myopia and localism of nationalism, except to an even greater extent. That some of the folks slinging ITS have now hey now, I have a few disagreements with Hitler and the historical Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei.” It’s true that now at long last a couple folks in this circle have voiced a critique of ITS. Yet in his essay in Black Seed inveighing against anyone loudly opposed to ITS, Bellamy’s “critique” of ITS functioned mostly as an attempt to distance them from anticiv nihilism, “Despite their many references to egoist and nihilist [sic] strands of anarchism, including quite recent ones concurrent with the above this is quite plainly a holy war, not a deconstruction of civilization through individual liberation. I see no room for a praxis of individual or small, intimate group liberation in conjunction with such an ascetic, semi-suicidal religious imperative“. Notice how askew this analysis is. Bellamy casts the problem with ITS as that they’re not focusing myopically enough! In this picture what’s wrong with ITS is the intensity and scope of their values. God fucking forbid someone feel strongly committed to action or some large goal. Surely that’s what’s actually intolerable about ITS. And never mind the values of “individual or small intimate group liberation” that Bellamy casts as somehow both nihilist and desirable instead. The problem with ITS is apparently that they care about shit beyond their friend circle. Such critiques of “moralism” are hard not to read in vein of the “the problem with all these cucks is they get triggered about shit” nihilism at the bedrock of the alt-right. Myself, being a “feverish” moralizing cuck, I diagnosed ITS as being too myopically focused in the immediate. The simple macho and subrational rush of brutal domination involved in murder, mixed with the visceral instinct of trees good concrete bad, both instincts fetishized by a all too nihilist failure to intellectually probe deeper or wider. Just as Richard Spencer admits that race or ethnicity is an arbitrary and contradictory construct, so too do they essentially admit that “the wild” is not ultimately an intellectually defensible category or concept, just as they’ve admitted they don’t get the science they castigate. They’re gonna go with the arbitrary value that psychologically resonates with them given their personal history, and fuck any sort of intellectual reflection that might undermine such or reorient them towards different values. Unlike certain fascists ITS is obviously not trying to convert large numbers of people to their cause, but they’re just as obviously leveraging the same sort of irrational psychological resonances that underpin fascism. A fetishization of violence and a return to mythologized lost tradition, a shrinking of one’s empathic circle to a closer relationships and othering of the rest, a ridicule for reason, truth, and intellectual diligence. It’s this latter trick that allows them to value their self-aware nonsensical construct of “the wild”. Note how these few nihilists only now “critiquing” ITS can’t bring themselves to actually make an argument for some values and not others. They never address how murder for sport is wrong or why the lives of strangers should matter to us. They don’t want to get drawn into such an explicit metaethical conversation because it would bare just how arbitrary their values of “self” interest and privileging a few immediate relationships over others are. They want to duck such with trivializing moves like “of course we’re against bad things” when said bad things are overwhelming socially recognized (and only when those bad things are overwhelmingly socially recognized), but the entire project of anticiv nihilism has increasingly seemed to be about expanding the overton window of what’s socially allowable. If they’re trying to distinguish themselves from ITS it’s obviously incumbent upon them to explain the walls holding their myopic focus on immediacy from devolving into the even more extreme reductio of that demonstrated by ITS. After a decade of attempting to erode anarchism’s capacity to say anything, to uproot its ethical foundations, they’re now left grasping at the air trying to assert that there’s no slippery slope between them and ITS. Despite a number of individuals in the anticiv nihilist milieu long praising or expressing delight at ITS (see Free Radical Radio for some of the more public individuals). When former anarchists reject not just the strawmen they set up with “moralism” but all ethics, declare that the abolition of oppression is impossible and undesirable, say “might makes right” and misanthropically fetishize mass die-off in a civilizational collapse, but then protest “sure, I don’t support killing random people” how honestly should we read such a deflection? And does it really matter if they do happen to arbitrarily draw such a line? Richard Spencer can say he wants “peaceful” ethnic cleansing, but we all know the inevitable conclusion of his values. And what else could he really get away with saying in public? To many of us ITS has laid bare the inevitable and boring conclusion of most of this most recent misbegotten “nihilist” project in North America. A notion of anarchy increasingly stripped of all ethical content and rendered into a shallow aesthetic of revolt and attack. By now we should all realize that such an aesthetic is entirely swallowable by and deeply reconcilable with reactionary forces. Let me clarify where I am personally coming from here, because I am certainly not suggesting that we banish everything remotely problematic or deviant. I am quite loudly reviled in a few of circles for taking iconoclastic stances in anarchism, as well as encouraging and facilitating critical dialog with ideas or circles deemed verboten. I have consistently been about challenging orthodoxies and expanding overton windows. I have built up and published writers that I have sharp and public disagreements with. While I have been vitriolic in my critiques of them I’ve nevertheless tabled and spoken at libertarian conventions, debated reactionary non-anarchist transhumanists, and even helped a bit in negotiating the original St Paul Principles — an influential treaty with maoists and liberals. I was once staunchly primitivist and have continued to engage at length with various branches of those ideas, even undertaking lengthy dialogs with some of today’s “eco-extremists” like John Jacobi (even despite Atassa’s inclusion of his writing). For a decade and a half since I worked up the backbone to stand up to the anarchist and leftist orthodoxy I’ve dealt with plenty of suspicious would-be scene police hoping to make a name for themselves by running me out of things for crimethink. Last year the LA Anarchist Bookfair side-eyed my application to table because they thought mutualism smelled like “propertarianism” — I would be certainly excluded by any ban on “individualists.” I’ve even hilariously been accused on Anews of trying to build a “red brown alliance” because a think tank I’m involved with engages in dialog with libertarians and the notoriously thirdpositiony Counterpunch has republished a few of our public domain essays (never mind that we’ve been the most consistent and outspoken critics of the fascist creep in libertarian circles, have converted thousands of libertarians, and are frequently targeted by actual fascists for our work). Syndicalists, Platformists, and “anarchists” in spitting distance of Maoism have said far worse about me, happily making up shit or conflating (“ancap” etc). I am well aware of how opportunistically “fascist” can be thrown by some and how hungry certain beurocratic dinosaurs in the red branches of anarchism are for inane ideological purges and unfair litmus tests. Anarchy is complex and varied in its application and we must embrace the often weird and unruly ideological mess that people make of it. We must continue to make sure there’s room for varying kinds of people with varying takes. But there are nonetheless still some boundaries to the anarchist project. There have to be or else anarchism would be absolutely indistinct from anything else and also immediately overrun. We don’t let fascists in our spaces. We don’t let a very large array of fucked up shit in our spaces. We don’t think that our goals justify literally any means, nor do we believe that a number of means can feasibly lead to the ends we desire — or else we would have no problem with state communists and claim that mass slaughter and imprisonment are capable of building a world we could ever be interested in. Many of the exact same people now wailing about someone ripping up a copy of Atassa at the Seattle Bookfair I remember once laughing in approval at state communists getting water dumped on their books when they tried to table anarchist bookfairs. There are and have always been things rightfully considered utterly beyond the pale in anarchism. It is not remotely acceptable to distro fascist propaganda, and certainly not at an anarchist bookfair — even if the writers originally came from the anarchist movement (as again in the case of some “national anarchists”). I know that my repeat comparison to nazis will be dismissed out of hand by a few — and shrieked about from the residual anews peanut gallery — as rank hyperbole, but when pressed no defender of ITS and Atassa has so far coughed up any attempt at meaningful distinction in why we should treat them differently. What’s so infuriating is that many of these people clearly perceive ITS as just some “misbehaving” comrades who are only a little bit lost. They know that they can’t just openly say that ITS’ values and analysis are close to their own because they know that anarchists at large would then revolt and kick them from the milieu like the “national anarchists” were once. Since Scott Campbell raised the profile of ITS’ targeting of anarchists and anarchist spaces, some folks involved with LBC have felt pressured into backpeddling a little. But these same cheerleaders knew damn well that ITS had tried to kill an anarchist years back and didn’t raise a peep then. It behooves us to ask what other random idiotic monsters these “ITS isn’t that bad” folks would thus invite into our spaces and discourse. Are they going to start publishing shit like Keith Preston’s “national anarchist” propaganda? This isn’t rhetoric — Aragorn has already done this. In the late oughts Aragorn facilitated “national anarchist” entryism on anarchistnews.org, on antipolitics.net, and in the Berkeley study group. Defending the inclusion of BANA members and publishing national anarchist writing. It’s great that he stopped, but it’s concerning as hell that such retractions only happened after a loss of social capital. (Honest props to those nihilists who called him out and cut ties with him over it.) What’s also flabbergasting is the audacity with which ITS apologists have instead tried to reframe the conflict around a motte and bailey of “indiscriminacy” in violence. As if the only thing objectionable is that some perfectly valid anarchist comrades are getting a little too sloppy when it comes to collateral damage in their actions. It’s insulting and disturbing that they think this reframing will work. ITS declares they want to kill everyone and proceed to target randos and anarchists — and their apologists try to turn the discussion into a re-litigation of the late 90s nonviolence debate. No anarchist project nor any manner by which anyone might move through our world, occurs without some form of violence — even the violence of nonviolence. But we can still recognize varying degrees of violence, and of domination, and subjugation. We can engage mindful of the context of our actions and the various feedback loops attendant to certain tactics or strategies. We can also — and this is the critical bit — seek to fucking minimize domination in the world, to expand things like agency and consent. The pretense that ITS’s murderfest and wish for mass death poses any serious or interesting questions for anarchists would be laughable if so many in LBC’s orbit haven’t somehow claimed such. Of course Atassa — as ITS’ English language press office — doesn’t even bother with such deflections. The only pretense of defense it conjures is feigned outrage at gringos talking shit about something in a (not so) distant country. What a laughable pastiche of anticolonialism and white liberal insecurities! Are anarchists not to condemn the North Korean government or the Assad Regime? Must we refrain from critique of the Muslim Brotherhood or Daesh when communists laud them? Where does this “can’t critique distant things” nonsense end? Can’t develop an opinion on someone widely called out for rape in a slightly distant city? Someone in our scene snitches and we get to say “well I’m not super close with all the relevant individuals“? I mean I know that a number in these circles actually would like us to be so de-fanged, but I wish they would explicitly step to with that argument so it can be roundly rejected. I mean is the level of bullshit used to equivocate and condemn condemnations of ITS really to be our future? Halfassed concern trolling and “whaddaboutism” where any restatement of what should be ethically obvious but somehow isn’t is in turn silenced as “virtue signaling?” When the same folks who condemned those speaking out against the bombing of an anarchist infoshop then whined about civility, free speech and the disrespect of LBC’s property in Seattle, the Bay Area Anarchist Bookfair organizers proclaimed that they wouldn’t exclude vendors based on their content. Immediately alt-right, anti-feminist, MRA, and pro-Israel material cropped up. Because. This. Is. What. Fucking. Happens. There are so many more reactionaries than anarchists in this world that they could sneeze and flood us out of our spaces or drown out our voice. Some bare community norms or expectations are inherent and necessary. I’ve pushed for tolerance and ecumenicalism for years, but it’s hard to imagine what could even remain if we accept publishing the de facto press office of a group that opposes freedom and is out to kill all humans. The alt-right literature was promptly removed from the Bay Area Bookfair by spontaneously organizing attendees, but however horrible the alt-right is let’s remember they at least don’t champion the extermination of literally everyone. Look, again, I get that there are dangers here. LA’s condemnation of “individualism” wholesale is obviously absolute trash. But just because something as central to anarchist practice as No Platform can be abused doesn’t mean anarchists can afford to suddenly discard it. Anarchism at core is an ethical stance against all domination, seeking the liberation of all — there should be room for vibrant intellectual diversity in discussing how this is applied, differences in strategy, prediction, and preferred implementation — but we cannot afford to erode the beautiful idea itself, to lend space and legitimacy to its avowed enemies. And we certainly shouldn’t be helping those actively trying to kill anarchists. LBC’s decision to publish Atassa, Anews’ publication of ITS manifestos, their continued hosting on AnarchistLibrary.org and as audio recordings on Free Radical Radio are obviously beyond the pale in the same way that nazi or tankie texts would be. Not because anarchism cannot survive forbidden readings — although it is shameful we’ve done such a poor job enunciating and defending our values that somehow a small number found ITS’ inane perspective to have resonance — but because such publication legitimizes a profound watering down of anarchist values and basic norms. http://clubof.info/