#and its totally reductionistic

[therealnotta]

wizard of oz: women are people and children are people and a little girl can be brave and determined and save so many people if you just respect them for the person that they are!! she has three adults on the adventure with her and when they all get captured and beaten and trapped she's the one to save them, because she's resourceful and talented and strong in her own right wizard of oz (MOVIE): be grateful for what you have girls lmao dorothy only killed the witch by accident while all of the real people were standing nearby. also it wasn't even real. also it was all her punishment for not wanting some random lady to take away her dog, serves her right for running away lmao

[rebeccathenaturalist]

It's always good news when a rare native species rebounds from the brink of extinction. The Kirtland's warbler was once down to about two hundred individuals, but with conservation efforts the population is almost to five thousand. This is still a very small number, but it's a heartening change.

The warbler was removed from the U.S. Endangered Species List in 2019. While this may seem like a good thing, it means these birds have lost some of the legal protection that earned them breathing room to recover. It also highlights the very procedural, quantitative way in which government entities try to define whether a species or habitat is "safe" or not. It's not as though once the warbler was off the list its problem all disappeared. Plus there are many species that face extinction that have never been listed simply because the data hasn't been sufficient--or even existent--to prove the threat.

And it also reflects the reductionist view toward science that is still all too common. While restoration ecologists and other conservationists are well aware of the interconnectivity of an ecosystem and how it is more than the sum of its parts, the idea that a single species is endangered in isolation ignores the complex interplay between species and habitat, and how habitat loss is the single biggest cause of endangerment and extinction across the board.

So while we celebrate rising numbers of Kirtland's warblers, we also need to be focused on protecting and restoring the pine forests of the upper Midwest that they prefer in summer, and their wintering grounds in the Bahamas. Moreover, we need to appreciate the need of all the beings in these habitats to have their homes and feeding grounds protected in total, not just a single species here and there. The warbler is just a starting point, and its continued success relies on the health of the intricate systems of which it is a part.

[elodieunderglass]

Hi! I was wondering if you could help me out with a word I've forgotten? I'm trying to remember the name for a concept that (I think) talks about how people better understand or process Things once they have vocabulary to describe it - I've heard it talked about in regards to the colour orange, or coercive control, etc.

long story short i've just read a paper saying ancient Greeks and Romans weren't racist bc they had no word for racism and am trying to form an argument against!

(no worries if this is unanswerable, i'm aware its a bit of a long shot but you struck me as a person who Knows Things)

That’s extremely kind and funny of you. i don’t know much but i am ok at synthesis.

I think you might be thinking of the concepts loosely called the “Sapir-Whorf hypothesis”, which describes something called “linguistic determinism.” This idea has been “disproven”, as it is just too reductionist as a concept - people are clearly perfectly capable of having experiences that are tough to describe with words. There will be plenty of papers showing how this reasoning is applied.

but it is still commonly thrown around and still considered a useful teaching framework. That’s why you’ll see it referenced online as if it is fresh, new, and applicable - people learn about it every year in college. Also, elements of the framework are probably perfectly sound. It definitely seems to be the case that language shapes brains; it just doesn’t seem to be the case that humans who don’t have specific words for them can’t experience orange, or the future.

(Many things in college are taught using teaching frameworks that may not be, technically, true; the framework is intended to give a critical structure for interpreting information. Then, when we later find evidence that disproves the hypothesis, that single piece of information doesn’t destroy our expensive college education; what we paid for is the framework. This is mostly frustrating in the sciences, when fresh crops of undergraduate students crash around on social media, grappling with their first exposure to (complex concept) and how it’s DIFFERENT to what they learned BEFORE and their teachers LIED TO EVERYBODY and they’re going to save the world from POP SCIENCE by telling the TRUTH. You’ll notice that these TOTALLY NEW INFORMATION reveals map along the semester schedule. The thing here is that getting new information, or information being different from what you were previously told, does not cancel out the fact that you are getting what you pay for - an education. Learning new facts that change our relationships to hypotheses isn’t a ✨huge betrayal ✨ , but the expected process of academia. Anyway.)

You have an interesting response here, and can start by looking at the ways that Sapir-Whorf has been disproved. There will be loads of literature on that.

However, it would be interesting to look at the argument as an unpicking of the other side’s rather weird, ritualistic superstitious belief that a behavior doesn’t exist if the creatures doing it can’t describe it. It is not on the ancient Greeks and Romans to categorise and interpret their behavior for a modern educated audience. They do not have the wherewithal to do so. They are also fucking dead. We can name the behaviors we see, and describe their impacts, however the hell we like.

Sure, the ancient Greeks used “cancer” to refer to lumpy veiny tumors. We can infer that they still had blood cancer, because their medical texts describe leukaemia and their corpses have evidence of it - they just didn’t know it was cancer. But we do, so we can call it cancer. Just because Homer said “the wine-dark sea” in a flight of girlish whimsy doesn’t mean he was unable to distinguish grape juice from saltwater, which we know, because we can observe that he was an intelligent wordsmith perfectly capable of talking about wine and oceans in other contexts. We are the people who get to stand at our point of history with our words, and name things like “this person probably died of leukaemia” and “poets say things that aren’t necessarily literal” and “this behaviour was racist” and “that’s gay” and “togas kinda slay tho” despite Ancient Greeks having different concepts of cancer, wittiness, prejudice, homosexuality, and slaying than we do today.

Now just to caveat that people do get muddled about the concept of racism. Our understanding of racism from here - this point of history, with these words, probably from the West - is heavily influenced by how we see racism around us today: white supremacy and the construct of “whiteness,” European colonial expansion, transatlantic chattel slavery, orientalism, evangelism, 20th century racial science, and so on. This is the picture of racism that really dominates our current discourse, so people often mistake it for the definition of racism. (Perhaps in a linguistic-deterministic sort of way after all.) As a result, muddled-up people often say things like “I can’t be racist because I’m not a white American who throws slurs at black American people,” while being an Indian person in the UK who votes for vile anti-immigration practices, or a Polish person with a horrible attitude about the Roma. Many people genuinely hold this very kindergarten idea of racism; if your opponent does as well, they’re probably thinking something like “Ancient Greek and Roman people didn’t have a concept of white supremacy, because whiteness hadn’t been invented yet, so how could they be racist?” And that’s unsound reasoning in a separate sense.

Racism as the practice of prejudice against an ethnicity, particularly one that is a minority, is a power differential that is perfectly observable in ancient cultures. The beliefs and behaviors will be preserved in written plays, recorded slurs, beauty standards, reactions to foreign marriages, and travel writing. The impacts will be documented in political records, trade agreements, the layouts of historical districts of ancient towns.

You don’t need permission to point out behaviours and impacts. You can point them out in any words you like. You can make up entirely new words to bully the ancient romans with. You are the one at this point of history and your words are the ones that get used.

Pretending that “words” are some kind of an intellect-obscuring magical cloud in the face of actual evidence is just a piece of sophistry (derogatory) on the part of your opponent here. It’s meant to be a distraction. You can dismiss this very flimsy shield pretty quickly and get them in the soft meat of them never reading anything about the actual material topic, while they’re still looking up dictionary definitions or whatever.

[transgenderer]

ok so maybe im just describing my predicament but i feel like...philosophically you should WANT to be a total reductionist relativist, no meaning but the one we make, no truth but predictions with an explicit algorithm for resolution, etc, BUT you should begrudgingly accept that something like "meaning", something like "nonempirical truth", something like "beauty" are real and exist and are even important. like, i guess i think the latter thing is true but has to be very strenuously argued for. and the greatest unfinished work in philosophy is putting those real-but-difficult-to-argue-for truths on strong footing. but thats hard, so instead people assume it and then do lots of elaboration there. and its like, sure, that elaboration is valid, but is it sound?

[dailyanarchistposts]

TFSR: So I’m very happy to be speaking with anarchist author Peter Gelderloos. Peter’s latest book, The Solutions are Already Here: Strategies for Ecological Revolution from Below is just out from Pluto Press, I just got my copy in the mail. Super stoked to get it. But welcome back to the show, Peter.

Peter Gelderloos: Thanks for inviting me, again.

TFSR: Facing the challenges of increasing climate chaos and its impact on life on Earth, feels really, really fucking daunting. Without thinking through the idea of like some centralized grand and technocratic response – which is kind of how I feel like I’ve been trained to think about big problems as big solutions – and not that that seems likely when countries at the industrial core aren’t even able to hold themselves to, you know, self imposed limits of cutting back on producing greenhouse gases, or even coordinating and distributing free vaccines to stop a pandemic.

So I’m sure I’m not the only one that’s head is kind of spinning when I try to think about the looming and existent climate disaster. How does this book kind of help to challenge that framework and mindset of expecting big centralized solutions to the problems that we face?

PG: Well, when you look at the history of how states have been dealing with ecological crisis, first of all, they’re very reductionist. They reduce a complex, multifaceted ecological crisis, which ties into so many problems – social and environmental – they tend to reduce it to emissions, greenhouse gas emissions, only to climate change. And they do that in large part not only because they don’t want to recognize many of these other problems, but also because technocrats need to simplify problems in order to reduce it to data that can be plugged into their machine, right?

So even though they’re they’re reducing it just to climate and they’ve been aware of the danger of climate change – like the US government recognized it as a national security problem already back in the 1960’s – their responses have been militarizing borders and increasing the deployment of militaries for, you know, so called disasters, natural disasters, and things of that nature. And then also making big agreements that have done exactly nothing to slow down greenhouse gas emissions.

So even within their reductionism, they don’t do a good job of dealing with the one part of the problem. And the other part of the problem that they recognize is actually bad for us: increasing militaries, militarizing borders and all that. So they are viewing the problem with interests that are diametrically opposed to the interests of living beings like ourselves. The larger part of it they have to ignore, and then of the part that they look at, half of it they don’t get right, and the other half they deal with in a way that that actively harms us.

We’ve also seen in a lot of these so called “natural disasters”, that the most effective responses for saving lives are responses that happen on the ground. It’s not the militaries, its neighbors, its regular people organizing themselves spontaneously with the logic of mutual aid. That’s what saves the most lives, we’ve seen that time and time and time again.

And absolutely, we are totally conditioned to rely on on the government to solve things for us, or, you know, major corporations, techno wizards like Elon Musk, or whatever. And that’s in large part because we’re forced into a situation of dependency and passivity and immobilization. Which is a very depressing position to be in normally, and it’s an even more depressing position to be in when we see the world dying around us. And so it’s completely coherent and consistent with that forced dependency and forced immobility to just either look the other way, or cross your fingers and hope and pray that, you know, some big godlike figure will come along and solve it for us. But it’s this big godlike figure that caused the problem and that is continuing to aggravate the problem.

So, actually, you get more intelligent solutions to problems from people who have on the ground knowledge, from people who are familiar with their territory, know that the resources they have. And it’s equally global, it’s just coming from the territory, it’s coming from below, rather than coming from either you know, boardrooms or situation rooms, where they’re not looking at the territory, they’re looking at maps. And they’re above all looking at their own interests of maintaining control. Because their ability to do anything in response to the problem is, in fact, predicated on our immobility, on our dependence, and our enforced passivity.

TFSR: So there’s almost like a sort of Stockholm syndrome that a lot of us – through the socialization from the state – have where we identify the the methods and the impulses of government in scary situations as being somehow salvatory, as opposed to sort of counterinsurgency constantly being operated for the continued extraction of resources.

PG: Absolutely. And I’m glad that you brought up counterinsurgency because that is one of the most important theoretical lenses to use to understand both ecological crisis and government, corporate and NGO responses to that crisis.

TFSR: A thing that kind of refreshing about this book is the radical critique of Western civilization as the vehicle for many of the woes that we experienced today. I appreciate that you attempted to undercut the misconception, right off the bat, that human nature is the cause for the destruction that we’re experiencing around us, or that there are too many of us or too many of certain kinds of us on the planet. Can you talk about the ideas of the Anthropocene or arguments around overpopulation, and why they present kind of a misdirection when seeking causes of anthropogenic climate change and resolutions of finding balance with the world?

PG: Yeah. Human beings have been around for a really long time, depending on you know, when exactly you identify the beginning of anatomically-modern human beings, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of years. Hominids with similar capabilities for longer. And the problems of destroying the ecological basis for life on this planet, for a great many species is a recent problem. And even the problem of causing ecological collapse in just one bio region is, in the broader timeline, a recent problem with maybe like four thousand years old, some of the earliest examples. And, again, some people – because we’re taught to view human history in this way that ends up being very white supremacist but focusing on the history of States – some people take that to mean “Oh, well, for the last four thousand years human beings have been destroying the environment. So you know, that’s what’s relevant.” No, for the last four thousand years humans have not been destroying the environment. A very small number of human beings have been doing that in a very small part of our overall territory until much more recently. And all across the world people fought against getting forcibly included in this new western model of being human. We do have examples of non-western cultures also destroying their soil or destroying their forests, destroying their ecosystem, but they weren’t nearly as good at it as Western civilization is, and that’s the dominant model, that’s the most relevant one to talk about.

So you know, that other question is relevant for the theoretical exercise of like, “okay, what exactly are the more destructive, or the healthier, forms of social organization?” but in the current media environment most people will bring up this kind of somewhat trivial fact at this point that maybe two thousand years ago, or one thousand years ago on another continent, a completely non-western society also caused major erosion. And that’s just an instance of deflection away from the fact that the problem that’s currently killing us is Western civilization.

So, you know, there are works that, for example: Fredy Perlman’s Against Leviathan that try to define what the problem is more broadly, but in the situation where we’re in right now, where species are going extinct at an accelerating rate, where millions of of humans are already dying every year because of the effects of this ecological crisis, and so many people are losing their homes, losing their land, losing their access to healthy food. The problem is the civilization, the modern state, the capitalist system that arose – centered in Europe – but also simultaneous to this process of mass enslavement in Africa and mass invasion, colonization and genocide in the Americas, in Africa and in Asia and Australia. That’s the problem.

If you take any criteria beyond just greenhouse gas emissions, it becomes very clear what’s the social model that is putting us all at danger. And even if you reduce it just to greenhouse gas emissions, you kind of avoid looking at the historical roots of the social machine that’s causing so much death and destruction. But it’s still very clear that Western civilization and the economic model that it forcibly imposed on the rest of the globe is the problem.

TFSR: So, one thing in the book you also say is that it’s necessary for us to critique science because it’s so shaped by those institutions who wield it, fund it and command it. Can you talk about this and how it differs from an anti-rational rejections of science for the sake of faith structures, or antimodernist frames of some anti-civ perspectives? And maybe speak about how you’ve observed our movements, or movements that you find inspiring in this framework, how they’ve been making and imagining their own science?

PG: Yeah, I mean, first off, maybe this is more semantical but like, I do think a critique of rationalism as a worldview is important. But then again, different people would mean very different things with that.

So just to focus on your question: in practice, in the real world, the scientific method cannot be divorced from the scientific institutions that currently control or manage the vast majority of knowledge production via the scientific method in this world that we inhabit. You know, I love science fiction, we can imagine other worlds but that’s the case in the one that we inhabit.

One thing that I think is important to recognize is that the scientific method is a very valid method for knowledge production, for falsifiable objective data. I think it’s also important to recognize that that’s not the only kind of knowledge. That there are many other kinds of knowledge that cannot be produced by the scientific method and that we run into… First of all there’s been no social system in the history of the world that I’m aware of that has ever relied only on that kind of knowledge. And our current “rationalist” society – speaking about rationalism as a sort of mythical worldview – uses a great deal of like non-falsifiable and subjective information, but they pretend that they don’t as part of this mythology. Which is very, very important to certain people, academics and whatnot.

So it’s important recognize, I think, that that’s not the only form of knowledge. And like, so a brief example of this: we can even see this when we get beyond the importance of, for example, emotional knowledge. How to deal with people, with other people in groups, how to take care of people, you know, this is something that’s actually incredibly important. And it’s amazing how easily it can be dropped by the wayside because it’s not reduced to numbers.

But for example we can look at health care. So there are forms of healthcare that are much easier to evaluate using the scientific method. And there are forms of healthcare that are much harder to evaluate using the scientific method. Finding out what happens when you dump some drug in a human body is much easier to evaluate, because the person who’s administering the drug doesn’t need to know anything about it. And they don’t need to know anything, or barely anything, about the person that they’re administering it’s to. And that’s sort of like the point of that whole methodology of treatment. Whereas other forms of treatment require much more subjective approach, a much more modeled approach, to the specifics of the person who’s being treated and they require a much more developed skill set to be able to deliver the therapy in an effective way.

So that’s not the fault of the therapy, that it can’t be evaluated as well by the scientific method. That’s a limitation or fault in scientific method. But we live in a society that’s so mechanized and that loves to be able to have – it’s in fact built up on – knowledge forums that can be plugged into the machine, and spit out the numbers. So it’s a society very much based on mechanical reproduction. That kind of society is going to favor the treatments that can be evaluated by the scientific method, and it’s going to disfavor or discourage or hide the treatments that can’t. And a year does not go by without us finding out about how damaging some form of medication was, or how damaging this blindness towards certain forms of therapy and care were.

And that doesn’t that doesn’t invalidate scientific knowledge production, but it does certainly speak to the question of social machinery. That it goes beyond just the question of, like, “Can we test this? Is it valid or not?” It’s that in fact, in practice, we can’t separate it from the question of social machinery.

What does that have to do with the ecological crisis? I already mentioned the reductionism of a multifaceted, very broad, very complex ecological crisis to climate change. That’s symptomatic of what I’m talking about. Climate change is something that’s more easy to quantify. We can measure it in temperature, we can measure it in parts per million carbon dioxide, we can measure it in emissions. Whereas things like what I know about the place where I live, what I know about the health of the soil in the place where I’ve lived for the past seven or eight years, is not something that I can quantify. But I know it, I think much better than someone who might come by and take a sample from a laboratory and test it but then not have any further relationship with the land. Someone who’s not out there taking care of these olive trees or planting a garden, year after year, and wondering when the rain is going to come and feeling it in their bones how this territory is desiccating. And how we actually need to start doing things now and fast as this climate becomes more of a desert. Because there are dead deserts, and they’re living deserts. And this land right here, where I live is going to become one or the other depending on what we do.

And the people in the laboratories are way behind the game and they have a lot less to offer. They do have things to offer, like there are certainly moments in which my gardening and other people’s gardening can be complemented by having access to that chemical test from the laboratory. And you know, that would be great to have that kind of complementarity, to have even solidarity at that level. But usually you don’t have that because our systems of knowledge are gaslit, we’re excluded from the resources that we would need to be able to access that and the people in laboratories generally have no idea what they’re talking about and think that they have access to some absolute, an all encompassing truth. And that’s problematic.

So yeah, there’s absolutely a possibility – I mean there should be a great deal of dialogue between different kinds of knowledge, including knowledge that’s produced through the scientific method – but we don’t have a lot of that now. And when you we look at how history has actually unfolding, the data produced by powerful scientific institutions regarding climate change has not been wrong, per se – the broad strokes of it have been correct, like for a while now they’ve been predicting what’s going to be happening, and it’s been happening – but it’s been quite conservative. Time and time again they’ve been way too optimistic in their predictions, and the kind of red lines or warning marks or benchmarks or whatever that they set are getting exceeded, they’re getting past years and decades in advance of their particular predictions.

So in terms of the precision of their predictions, they have high precision predictions. Like, me looking at the soil and the rain clouds or you know, someone who’s actually lived there their whole life and has access a lot more ancestral knowledge that I don’t have access to, they’re not going to be able to come up with like a high precise prediction of like “Okay in 20 years this is going to happen” but I think they will get a much more accurate prediction. Whereas the scientific institutions have had high precision and low accuracy. So they’ve actually been wrong in a dangerous way again and again and again. And I don’t think it’s a coincidence, given their proximity to and affinity with the institutions that are most directly responsible for the destruction of the current global ecosystem.

TFSR: So yeah, I guess that’s a good clarification is like systems of knowledge rather than sciences. And as you say that seems like the need from the Western civilization, or the organizations that are working within it, to have crunch-able numbers and quantities that they can put into their figures. Seems like it would also not only would it limit the output information but it probably blinds the people that are making the measurements, even if they’re trying to make the right measurements to see the actual outcomes.

The approach of looking systemically and trying to say that, in fact, all of these systems and how they correlate to each other can fall under one umbrella that we call “Civilization” and its colonial impulse, or “Western Civilization” and its colonial impulse, when people see a critique that is that large, oftentimes people will say, “Ah, but there are things that we have gotten from this system”, they will say that. They will say that capitalism has driven innovation and the creation of certain kinds of knowledge or certain kinds of technology that have benefited human life in a lot of ways. For instance one thing that they can point to is around medical science. And as you said, there are some treatments that have proven to be not so much treatments as poisons. It’s not a like an assured thing that medical science will resolve issues, but there are a lot of technologies that have been developed and applied over the centuries that are positive. And I could see someone saying, “well do I choose between the current structure and like small reforms within it, or supporting a sort of revolutionary alteration in the productive models, the distribution of resources and capacity to produce these technologies that are saving my life, or making it so that I can be mobile, or extending life” for folks that have very serious medical issues for instance?

There has been critique, for instance, of criticisms of modern civilization that came out of Earth First at its beginnings, or other pro-ecological movements that look at not human beings as the problem necessarily, but technological development as being – and the sciences and the knowledges that come out of that, not to say that they’re just produced from that, but that are applied there. Saying “if the government fails, for instance, or if the economy scales back, I’m not going to be able to get my medication and I may die”. Can you talk a little bit about the sort of reticence that someone would have of trying to approach a degrowth of the economy and the government, because they’re afraid that what safety nets exist for them currently would no longer be there, and they wouldn’t survive it?

PG: Yeah, that’s definitely a very legitimate way to address questions of social change. And I think it’s actually super important when we inhabit our own bodies, our own experiences and needs when we’re talking about proposals of widespread social transformation, and struggle, generally.

I think it helps to primarily consider two different things. One is that if we break out of an individual’s framework – which, like I said, that concern that you’re posing is very important, there’s also an iteration of that concern which is very dangerous. Because if we make a critique of Western Civilization on the basis of how many people it’s killing, how many millions of people are starving to death because of this model, all of the forests and ecosystems that are getting destroyed, it can be dangerous. You definitely don’t want to go into a framework of “it’s us or them, someone has to die in this situation”.

So first off, I think we need to break out of any kind of individualist or competitive conception of this problem. And if we look more systemically, or if we look at health as a collective good, the healthiest possibilities for human society are ones in which people have a healthy reciprocal relationship with their environment. They have access to the commons, they have access to a very diverse and healthy diet that is locally adapted. And that is, in fact, based on brilliant technologies that were thousands of years in the making, that existed in every territory before colonialism, which is a technology without whirring gadgets and lights and bells and whistles but it’s the technology of how we build up our survival mutually with the other organisms around us, with the other living beings around us. Many of those technologies still exist. And so without colonialism, with access to that commons, with access to that kind of rooted, territorial, popular and ecological technology, that is the best hope that a human community has for health. For the healthiest lives possible for all their members. So that’s one thing that I think is really necessary to acknowledge. That we live in a system that produces a disease, that produces death and that’s a huge problem that we can’t sweep under the carpet.

The other good thing is that when we destroy governments and capitalism, everything that they own, everything that they think is theirs, everything that they blackmail us with – because they control access to it and we have to spend our lives working to try to get a small piece of it – it’ll be ours. And so once all the rich people are gone, and once all the cops and all the politicians are gone, all of that will be ours. And we can decide to get rid of it, we can decide to keep it, we can decide to make it ourselves in under much better circumstances. So things like medicine we’ll obviously keep making and we’ll find ways to make it that are healthier, we’ll find productive processes that are less damaging for the environment. And we’ll also be changing our living conditions so as few people as possible need access to those technologies, but those who do need that access will get it.

And then we’re also forced to deal with other other technologies, like nuclear reactors and nuclear bombs that the state has saddled us sadly with the necessity to mediate those in the best way possible, because they’re not going away for, you know, forever. Some of those radioactive substances will be around for billions of years, so “thank you, government!” But we will do a better job of handling that than they do. Because we care about us. And because we’re actually good at organization when we get the chance. In the US every single nuclear waste storage facility has leaked at one time or another. So they’re crap at it and they’re also to blame for it. On my worst days, I definitely fantasize about, you know, locking them all in the nuclear storage facility, there’d be certain poetic justice to that.

But thinking about it more realistically, and in the question of our needs, all of it will belong to us for better and for worse, and we’ll figure out how to take care of us. And we’ll do a much better. Even though lately in our movements, it’s pretty depressing, because we’re I think learning a bit too much from the system we live in, and we’re doing, frankly, often a pretty terrible job of taking care of us. But we can do much better than the state or capitalism ever could.

TFSR: Yeah, and they’ve had the opportunity to prove that already. And there’s tons of people that, you know, in as far as distribution of treatment methods for things, or COVID vaccines, or whatever, like, they have proven that it is not in their interest, it is actually in their interest to deny large swaths of the population any number of these things so that they can mark up the price and make more money off of less.

PG: Yes.

TFSR: So some of the most inspiring parts of the book, for me, were the examples of resistance to mega projects, to the expansion of colonial extractivism as well as to some of the alternative movement experiments and infrastructures that you highlight and that you get voices from, which is great. Were there any that you wanted to include but you just didn’t have time to fit that you might share with the audience?

PG: Um, there are definitely some. There are some cases where I was looking for interviews and I wasn’t able to get in touch with the comrades who would be able to speak from personal experience about those struggles, or I was able to get in touch but they were in the end too busy to do interviews, because things are pretty difficult. And so I can name some of those, maybe for people to look at the more, but I won’t go into them precisely because I wasn’t able to learn enough about them.

So, for example, in the movement in Kurdistan, an ecological focus is a large part of the analysis. And it’s a territory that’s been very damaged by war, by desertification, by forced impoverishment coming from the various countries, the various states, that control Kurdistan. And so I know, in fact yeah some friends helped put out a book about some of the experiences in trying to helped make that desert bloom. But yeah, the comrades, it’s been, of course, a rough time over there so the comrades weren’t able to give an interview about that. So that didn’t make it into the book.

Let’s see… There are many, many very interesting struggles in India. I mentioned some of them on the basis of already published research, but I wasn’t able to arrange any interviews with comrades there. India’s interesting because there are very, very different experiences of reforestation, that demonstrates, again, just how we can’t really trust the media, how we can’t trust governments when they talk about this. Because reforestation means completely different things depending on on who’s saying it, and a lot of forms of reforestation are very, very bad for the environment. They’re basically things that, say, like a government like Chile will do to be able to get counted as like a negative carbon emission country, so then they can make money with carbon trading. When, like, in Chile the reforestation is very much an industrial activity which is which is bad for the environment, very bad for the soil, bad for the water table. And it’s very much a colonial activity, because it’s taking place on the lands of Indigenous peoples who are in the process of trying to recover their lands. And a huge part of that process is trying to win back their food autonomy.

So forests are important. And forests can also be edible forests. These pine plantations, these mono-crop pine and eucalyptus plantations that are being planted by the official institutions, are definitely not food forests. No one can feed themselves off of them. But also agricultural fields are important for a lot of people’s to feed them selves. And the official reforestation happening in Chile is often used as a weapon against Indigenous struggle, against the struggle, for example, of the Mapuche for food autonomy, for getting their land back and being able to feed themselves off of their land using traditional technologies and whatever modern or Western technologies that they feel like adapting. That’s up to them. And to the extent that they can do that, to the extent that they have food autonomy, they have a vastly increased ability to fight back against the colonizing state because they’re no longer dependent on global capitalism. And they’re no longer dependent on the state that they colonizes them.

And so in India there’s some really great examples that really contrast how ineffective and also how damaging state-led efforts for mass reforestation are, how they just respond to this technocratic impulse to produce numbers on paper – when on the ground it’s a completely different story – versus communities, many of them Indigenous communities, that have been undergoing very, very effective, large scale forms of reforestation that improve soil health, that increase the possibilities for food autonomy, the increased quality of living, and that, you know, helped create more robust ecosystems with habitat for other species and in addition to just humans. So I would love to one day meet comrades who are participating in that because there’s some really powerful struggles happening there.

TFSR: Well, you do put the invite in the book for a longer extended, like, sequel if folks had more stuff inspired along those lines. So if any listeners are out there and want to write that book, I would love to read it.

Over the years, we conducted a couple of interviews with Anne Peterman from a group called “No GE Trees”, who was talking about that struggle in Wallmapu and – because they were similarly trying to build solidarity with resistance to that sort of mono crop forestation that damages the soil, that depletes the water tables, that denudes the landscape of the vitality and the variation that’s required for native species to exist in it throughout actually the US South – so people were protesting in the Asheville area in solidarity with not only resisting GE Tree plantations in the southeast, but also in Chile.

And a lot of those trees, they’re not good for a lot of things, they’re not good for making lumber out of, especially eucalyptus. Growing up on the West Coast…they’re not good for windbreaks, they got planted for windbreaks, they’re not good for railroad ties, that’s what they got planted for at one point, but they get chopped up after a couple of years of growing, so not even creating a mature forest, and processed down into wood pellets, and then sent to Europe so that European governments can claim that they’re using a renewable source of energy production. It’s just this game of shells with carbon and basically pollution and degradation. It’s a continuation of the extractivism of neocolonialism.

PG: Absolutely.

TFSR: We’ve already seen a measurable connection between climate change, the disruption of food production, exacerbating conflicts, and being used as a weapon against Indigenous communities as you’ve noted, and resulting in increased refugee movements and displacement. As a result, right wing tendencies have welcomed an escalation of conflict and inequality, the building and buttressing of physical and metaphorical walls, and the acceleration of fossil fuel extraction to suck out every drop of profit that can be withdrawn before it’s too late. And to be fair, I say, “right wing”, this also goes for centrist neoliberal regimes as well but the rhetoric looks more actively genocidal oftentimes, and facilitates extraparliamentary violence when it comes from the far right, usually.

Would you talk a bit about the importance of the increasingly, in some ways, difficult project of fostering internationalism and inner communalism against this, nationalist tendency as the climate heats up?

PG: Yeah, obviously the far right, and neoliberal centrist more so, have a lot of advantages because they have access to resources, they get a lot more attention. They’re taken seriously. So even a lot of centrist media that pay attention to the far right in a disapproving way still help them out more than the way that they treat like truly radical transformative revolutionary movements by just ignoring them. Because we’re kept in this in this permanent place of either not existing or being infantilized and we have, as you pointed out, we have a lot of work to do on this front.

And we can also talk about forms of internationalism that are very damaging. This is a kind of internationalism, which is completely under the thumb of, you know, colonial or neocolonial institutions. It’s this worldwide recruitment that takes place, largely through universities of – sometimes in a limited fashion it’s been analyzed as a Brain Drain, but I think it goes beyond that. Basically training and recruiting people from all over the world to participate in this system – whether it’s under the auspices of the United Nations, or under the auspices of some prestigious university in the Global North – to create an internationalism which is a completely monistic, technocratic, simplified worldview that builds consensus about what the world looks like, what the problems look like, and what the solutions are, within elite institutions that are completely cut off from all of the various territories of the world, even as those institutions increase their recruitment to a global scale. So that they have representatives or spokespeople from all the different continents from all over the world but they’re brought together in a sort of epistemological, technocratic space, which is completely a reproduction of colonialism, and makes it flexible but furthers the dominance of Western civilization, of white supremacist civilization.

And so that’s the kind of internationalism, which is very, very present, and it has access to a great deal of resources. And on the other hand, in the Global North, we’re not doing a nearly good enough job to create a very, very different and subversive kind of internationalism. And the comrades who are doing the best job of that tends to be migrant comrades, comrades who have who have migrated, who have crossed borders. I think a lot of folks who grow up with the privilege of citizenship in the Global North, if they do travel, if they do try to get like a more global perspective, it’s often still done in this individualist way that has a lot more to do with tourist vacations than with the needs of revolutionary struggle. And so we don’t have – I mean we don’t really have communities in the Global North, because the triumph of capitalism is so complete – but we don’t have radical groups that are attempting to be communities that pool resources in order to intentionally create global relationships of solidarity with communities and with struggles in the Global South that they could actually be supporting, and that they could actually be creating dialogue with to develop the rich, detailed, global perspectives that we actually need, as well as the possibility for global solidarity.

So, yeah, in the book, towards the end, I do this exercise of imagining what if we’re actually able to do what I’m talking about. Or what I’m trying to argue in the book is like a real model for a revolutionary transformative response to the ecological crisis. And so since I’m talking about the need to root ourselves in our territory, I imagine “Okay, here we are in Catalunya, what does this look like over the next few decades?” And one of the first things is in Barcelona and Tarragona we have these big ports with these big old ships that are currently moving merchandise all around the world. And that’s something that on the one hand it needs to stop because of how much that’s based on fossil fuels and on unnecessary consumption and all the rest. And the later timeline, in that chapter of the book is, you know, maybe much more beautiful and romantic, imagining there’s no more borders and people can traverse the world in sailboats, which are sailboats that have been expropriated from from the wealthy, who of course no longer exist. And and I think that’s a beautiful thing to imagine.

It’s really nice to think about a world that we’re actually allowed to live in, and that people all over the world can travel and go where they want. But right now we have the ugliness to deal with. And so in those ports, there are fuel reserves that have already been dredged up from the earth and there are these big ocean-going cargo ships. So there’s a part that talks about expropriating those cargo ships, getting in touch with revolutionary comrades in the Global South that we already have a relationship with and finding out what they need.

There’s the example of early on in the pandemic, both in Catalunya and another territories, workers taking the initiative to re-purpose their factories to make parts for respirators in a way that was faster and more agile than the capitalist were able to do. So kind of taking a cue from that I imagine this process of, okay, instead of sending merchandise, which is just furthering a relationship of dependency – I was speaking with this one comrade from Venezuela, other comrades from from Brazil, like a major thing is their economies and their material environments have been intentionally structured in a way so they don’t have a lot of very basic things that they need, that in Europe or North America would be easier to find. So for example, like basic machine parts for the machines that would be needed to process food. Not even talking about some hyper industrial and unnecessary endeavor, but basic things like harvesting, threshing, and milling grains, for example. So instead of, you know, a relationship of dependence, where this really fertile territory, like Venezuela, gets grain imports of European grains that Indigenous and Afro Indigenous populations have not been traditionally consuming and that are certainly less healthy – so, basically supermarket food. Instead of importing supermarket food, this short term process of exporting those cargo ships, re-purposing factories from the automotive industry to make some of these simple machine parts, and then using the existing fuel reserves to send off these cargo expropriated cargo ships, so that in these other territories that are colonized, neocolonized territories, that we have a relationship and solidarity with, they can create their own material autonomy and break that dependence once and for all. And then we’re also not just navel gazing and thinking “how are we going to survive the climate apocalypse and making sure that our bunkers are well stocked?” But we’re actually thinking about collective survival in a way that is solidaristic, in a way that is realistic, in a way that is global, and in a way that recognizes our responsibilities, given the past and present of colonialism and white supremacy.

TFSR: Yeah and I would say that the one group that I’m familiar with that really has continued doing a good job on the subject of building or continuing solidarity across the borders is Zapatista structures. In the US there is still, despite the fact that the Zapatista revolution happened 30 years ago, and there are still active, six declaration Otra Compaña groups or whatever that are around all sorts of parts of Anglo dominated North America, Turtle Island. Like, it’s just astounding, and I wish – but people did it really well during that period of time. And I think that that’s something that’s been lost is these clear lines of communication, and the building of inspiration, the sharing of knowledge, of experience across that border to the south of the nation state that I live within the borders of. There’s so many overlaps, and labor struggles that happen. There’s so much cross border transit of goods and I have so much more in common with people across that border than I do who fucking run those corporations here.

PG: Yup.

TFSR: Another point that I really liked in the book – and you approach this in a number of different ways, or I read this in a number of different places – talking about the importance of territorialization. And maybe that’s the wrong term, but being rooted in the land base that you’re in, listening to it, trying to understand what it teaches and how to live with it. Recognize how other people have done that, and like rooting your struggle in a sense of place. And this is one of the reasons that some of these anticolonial and anticapitalist resistance movements in different places around the world look so different is because they’re rooted in different legacies and practices, religions, languages, and experiences of colonization. And I really appreciate the fact that you point this out and you say, “Look, don’t expect everyone around the world to circle their A’s, or to use the term ‘autonomy’ necessarily for what they’re doing. But just recognize similar traits among people that you can have solidarity with in the struggle against global capitalism and colonization”. Can you talk a little bit about some of these similar traits, how you kind of identify these like versatile strategies?

PG: Yeah. So yeah, I think I do use the word “territorialization” or “territorialized” and that’s largely coming from Catalan and Spanish. In English “territorial” tends to be an ugly word because it’s associated with possessiveness, with drawing borders. I find it a very useful concept that’s used here so I just started using it in English. I would just encourage people to look at the roots of that word, “terra” or “tierra”, like the earth. A relationship with the earth not as like this big, abstract blue planet floating in the void but the earth under our feet.

So it’s interesting because you’re asking about similarities – oh god this is gonna sound like some cliched bumper sticker or something like that – but my first response is to say that the similarity is in the difference. Because in an act of war against this world of supermarkets and Amazon and smartphone screens which impose this secretly white supremacist homogeneity, when you territorialize you are becoming part of a long historical tradition that is so so so specific to the exact place where you live and nowhere else. So that means eating different food, cooking it in a different way, pruning different trees, it means speaking a different dialect of a different language. It means things that at first glance are maybe more defined or marked by their difference, but when you when you see like gatherings of peasants from different countries around the world, or gatherings of gardeners, gatherings of revolutionaries who very much believe in being territorial in this sense that I’m trying to talk about it, who believe in having their roots in the ground beneath their feet, and fighting from that relationship and understanding themselves within that relationship…

One thing that strikes me is how much pleasure there is in sharing “This is how you do it? This is how we do it. Oh, this is what you eat? This is what we eat.” And so even on the face of it, the color of that, the texture of that seems to be bringing out differences but I think that really what’s the conversation that happens there – and it feels this way to me like insofar as I’m this alienated exsuburbanite who is engaging in relatively later in my life, to a limited extent has felt this way – that like, beneath the words, there’s the sort of language of love which is completely an exercise in sameness. Not the sameness of homogeneity, but the sameness of “We’re living beings in this earth and we love the Earth, it gives us our lives, we love the other living beings around us.” And so really people all across the world who are living in autonomy and calling it different things and using very, very different technologies and eating very different foods, and all the rest, are on a deeper level doing the same thing, and I think can often recognize ourselves in one another.

TFSR: I guess jumping back to a reference that you made a little bit ago, I was very moved by your chapter, A Very Different Future, where you were describing – this isn’t the primary part of it, the first part of it at least you were describing – an alternative view of where we might be if we go down this path and sort of a best case scenario of how reframing and healing the world could look. I feel like though there is a lot, lot of doing needed to change the course that we as a species are on – or that we who live under the civilization, are forced to live another civilization live in… One of the primary challenges that we face is one of imagination. Because imagination feeds the soul, it’s a playful creativity, it’s a necessary part of, I think, what it is to be alive. Can you speak about this, and sort of point to any projects or movements or people that you think listeners might appreciate in terms of having a radical imagination, and being brave enough to share that out with other people?

PG: Huh. Yeah, I’d start off underscoring how important I think imagination is, like you said. I think it’s, I don’t know, maybe I think it’s more important than hope. Sometimes it’s just really not possible to access hope. But it’s nice, even in those moments, to be able to look out your window or look at the street and see a completely different world filling up that space, even if you don’t think you’ll ever live to see it. So that I think is extremely important. And I don’t think that we can, I mean, obviously the world that we create is going to surprise us. It’ll be born and dialogue with us and it will also insist on certain things and impose itself in certain ways. But at the same time, I don’t think we can create a society that we’re unable to imagine. Even though the caveat that I was trying to trying to communicate is that it will still be different from how we imagine in, but the imagining it is a hugely important part of creating it.

And I think it’s extremely, extremely important to make a very, very clear analytical and strategic distinction between imaginings and blueprints. Creating blueprints is just a furtherance of the war against the planet. It is an extremely colonial act to impose a blueprint on the world. And actually, this reticence towards imagination is probably the biggest criticism I’ve ever had of insurrectionary anarchism. Like this general refusal to imagine. Which isn’t even really well supported by the theoretical bases of insurrectionary anarchism. I think it’s just more often manifests as a fear, like an insistence of focusing on the present, which has some important strategic elements to that insistence. Like we’re gonna focus on the present. But then there’s also I think this fear of actually going beyond that.

Who is doing a good job of sharing these imaginings, these imaginations? So okay, there’s this one group that I interviewed in the US for the book. I keep their location anonymous, but basically they get funds and divert theirs, or they take advantage of some financing that’s intended for other purposes. Basically it’s intended to help large scale industrial farmers buy trees for windbreaks and whatnot. And this is a radical anticapitalist group that buys massive amounts of trees, like tens of thousands of trees in order to help neighborhoods move towards food autonomy. And I haven’t seen them do anything that’s explicitly propagandistic works of imagination. Like “we can imagine this area that we live in being an abundant orchard, where you can grow our own healthly food and not rely on wage labor to get low quality food”. But I think on the material level, there’s a great deal of imagination in what they do.

And I think also a lot of it refers back to peasant and Indigenous imagination from Latin America, because a lot of the neighborhoods where what they do is most effective are neighborhoods with with a large number of Central American migrants who have a lot of experience with growing their own food and with combining residential and agricultural spaces in a way that is generally not done in the Global North. And so if not on the level of like written propaganda, at the very least on the material level, there is a thriving imaginary in that project of neighborhoods, poor neighborhoods, working class neighborhoods that increase their quality of life by growing healthy food. And this is one small group that’s doing this, if this were done across the US, then you’d be creating like an atmospherically significant amount of carbon reduction, of carbon being brought down from the air by reforestation. It’s done in a complex healthy way and not in like a mono cropping, genetically engineered way, and it also gives working class neighborhoods access to healthy food.

Also, most of the trees that they’re planning are autochthonous, how do you say that in English? They’re native, they’re native species, most of which have been neglected by industrial agriculture because industrial agriculture imposes a lot of needs, that are divorced from the needs of human and environmental health. Like transportability: apples are great because they can be they can be hard, they can be harvested early, and then they can be shipped around the world. Pawpaws, for example, are a very, very important native tree food from North America they’re kind of too mushy, they don’t work so well being transported so they don’t work so well as a supermarket food. And so it’s a very healthy food, which is a part of Indigenous cultures, Indigenous histories, Indigenous technology, which is just removed from the equation by how it’s done. And so it’s it’s really awesome to see a group that’s bringing back a lot of those native species and increasing biodiversity and increasing human health in working class neighborhoods.

Aside from more material projects, there’s something very, very important that anarchists have actually been doing for a long time, and that is experiencing a very, very exciting rebirth, which is anarchists speculative fiction. Whether science fiction or fantasy, there is increasing attention being being paid to some of the greats from the recent past, like Octavia Butler who’s a radical, not an anarchist but someone I’ve learned a lot from, someone that, it doesn’t matter that she’s not an anarchist, she’s a really great writer and really great thinker. So yeah, Octavia Butler, Ursula K Le Guin, over here [in Spain and Catalunya], for example, they’ve even been republishing and reprinting some of the anarchists who are engaging in some speculative fiction from out of the workers movement in the late 19th century. And then you also have a lot of current writers who are putting out anarchist speculative fiction, and that’s something that we really need to support and we need to try to spread beyond just the movement. Get it into our libraries, get it into our local bookstores, because that’s generally more effective in spreading anarchist ideas and anarchist imaginaries then, you know, then a lot of our nonfiction writing.

TFSR: Yeah, plus, it’s fun.

PG: Oh, yeah.

TFSR: [giggles] I’ve seen warnings on social media and in some recently published books such as Climate Leviathan – which honestly, I have not finished yet, just haven’t had time – but of ideas of eco-Leninism, or eco-Maoism, an ostensibly leftist authoritarian state response to climate destabilization, then I’ve got a feeling that it’s not just about Derek Jensen anymore. Can you talk a little bit about this tendency, and if you see this as an actual threat with actual adherence, like an actual threat to liberty?

PG: Yeah. Probably most significantly Andreas Malm took it into a new territory, well beyond, for example, like Derek Jensen, with that group. And so this is something that is getting us lot of attention in anticapitalist academic circles. I’ve never seen anywhere where it has any implantation on the ground, like directly in real struggles or in social movements. So from that perspective, it would seem just like a very out of touch, elite, making kind of wild arguments that are fairly ridiculous and irrelevant. Except I think we’ve seen dynamics before, where when the official centrist practices and ideologies flounder, and are unable to produce solutions that the system needs in order to correct and survive – and that’s definitely, we are entering that that period of history right now- where authoritarian elements in social movements that seem to be very, very tiny and not very relevant, all of a sudden go really big, really fast.

That happened in a huge way in the Spanish Civil War, where the authoritarian Communists were completely irrelevant and tiny, and the anarchists had so much influence in the revolutionary movement. And then in less than a year, because of outside funding and because of elite power structures making alliances of convenience, all of a sudden authoritarian revolution – supposedly revolutionary methodology because in fact the Stalinist were quite explicit in saying that they weren’t trying to fight the revolution in Spain – where those authoritarian currents gain ground really, really, really rapidly. And so we need to learn from history, we need to prepare ourselves for that eventuality or inevitability, and we need to be making the arguments now about how these authoritarian ways of looking at the problem are completely detached from people’s needs and the needs of actual ecosystems, and how they are completely unrealistic given the nature of the problem.

That also means being more vociferous about talking about our methodologies, our solutions, and the victories or partial victories that we have. In the case of Andreas Malm, he made it a little bit easier to beginning with some pretty obviously racist, anti-Indigenous statements that he made. I mean he’s very much… he has trouble seeing past the needs of the reproduction of Global North white supremacist society. But I think later iterations of that kind of authoritarian, Eco-Leninist thinking are going to be more sophisticated and they’re going to do a better job at hiding their colonial and white supremacist dynamics. And so I think we need to, yeah, we need to be conscious of that danger while it’s still small.

TFSR: Does it seems strange to you that AK Press just published a book by him last year? How to Blow up a Pipeline.

PG: Um I mean, yeah. There are anarchists publishers that take the approach of only publishing books that they feel affinity with, and I think some really, really important literature that is not commercially viable has gotten circulated that way and that’s really important. And then there are other other radical publishers, like AK that take the approach of being a very broad platform. And there’s some things that AK publishes that I wouldn’t have found out about or gotten access to that both have a broader appeal or like a less radical appeal, and that are also exactly the things that anarchist, especially in North America, need to be thinking about that address things that we historically ignore and do a terrible job of. And then there are things that AK or similar publishers have published that I wouldn’t touch with a 10 foot pole, or that I would touch to burn maybe?

TFSR: [chuckles] Yeah, and I’m not meaning to put AK Press on the spot specifically, but like, that book, and then like, Nick Estes-

PG: The same thing applies, like PM, like all these larger platform publishers. I think I as a person would tend more – just because of I don’t know, my personality, or whatever – would tend more to the sort of small affinity kind of oriented model. But I’m also able to recognize that the way a broader publisher does things has advantages, and it puts us in contact with texts and ideas that we really need to be in dialogue with, and that if we’re just focusing on affinity we’ll never get out of our little echo chamber.

So, yeah, and then some of the Marxists who I respect who are closer to anarchism, say that Andreas Malm’s earlier, big seminal book was important and useful. Like about climate capitalism, about looking at the intersections between climate change and capitalisms earlier development. So, you know, evidently he’s put out things that are theoretically useful, but I think he’s kind of a clown when it comes to direct action. Like he’s coming from this highly privileged, Scandinavian social democratic vantage point where he can talk about his flirtation with direct action from a few years ago without the risk of going into prison, which is [laughing] another planet for the rest of us. And then he, with How to Blow Up a Pipeline, it just seems so like vapid and fatuous. Like this highly privileged academic talking really tough about “yeah, we’re gonna take this thing down” when he really has no idea what he’s talking about and he tends to talk about it in very irresponsible and unrealistic ways.

TFSR: Available at a bookstore near you…

PG: [laughs]

TFSR: [laughing] So, one of my favorite answers to the question of “How can listeners offer solidarity from where they’re at?” that I’ve asked guests in the past, one of the best answers that I’ve gotten consistently from people that are doing anti-megaproject work, or blocking pipelines – megaproject I guess – anticolonial struggles, is to do that work where we’re at, against the oppressive dynamics here to destabilize the capitalist core, so that autonomy can flourish here, as well as at the peripheries. And I feel like that was really echoed in the conclusion of your book. What would you tell people a good next step is after reading the book? [laughs] Leading question?

PG: I mean, in tandem with developing a global perspective, that’s real, that’s based in actual relationships of solidarity with the people and with struggles in other parts of the world, I would say that taking steps, at least baby steps towards food autonomy, is something that can be done anywhere, needs to be done anywhere. And that it’s also an interesting exercise or an interesting line of attack, because it can kind of give us new perspectives on what are the structures that get in the way of our survival? You know, what are the structures that really need to be identified as enemies? And sharing food is is a really powerful activity on every level. And so moving beyond more superficial practices of affinity, towards practices of solidarity with people who are, you know, don’t think the same way as us, as a step towards actually creating like a community worthy of the name, food is extremely important. Being able to share food, being able to decrease dependence on capitalism, that aspect. If I had to give a shorter answer I would highlight that for special attention.

TFSR: So start a garden. You heard it here first.

[both crack up together]

PG: Housing! Housing is really important.

TFSR: Totally.

PG: Taking over housing, anyways, yeah. To answer properly you’d have to talk about so many different things.

TFSR: I guess intervene where you can and have some imagination. I really liked the fact that a couple times in the book that you challenged the the readership to “no, really, stop reading. Please take a moment, close your eyes or look out the window and just do some thinking”. Yeah, that’s good.

Peter, are you working on anything else right now or just kind of like, taking care of business between between books?

PG: Uhhhhh, right now just trying to stay alive and yeah. I think we’re doing a very bad job generally in our movements of taking care of ourselves and taking care of each other. And so I’m trying to look at that more. Yeah, trying to get off my ass to actually plant my garden once it’s spring. And yeah, we’re still working on the infrastructures gatherings, anarchists infrastructures gatherings here in Catalunya. Whenever I find the motivation to start working on the next book, the next one will probably be a critique of democracy, both representative and direct. And then I’d also love to get to this research project about the invention of whiteness in the Spanish colonial experience, since it’s been mostly studied in the English experience of the invention of whiteness through through colonialism.

TFSR: Cool. Well, thanks for this lovely book. I really enjoyed the read and thank you for taking the time to talk.

PG: Thank you. Thank you for taking the time to talk and thanks for, thanks for reading, thanks for the conversation and, yeah. Thanks for being in touch.

TFSR: Of course.

[dipperdesperado]

notes on class analysis beyond class reductionism

In which your favorite anarchist cherry-picks their favorite pieces of identity politics and syncretizes them with his favorite parts of sociological class analysis (with a focus on Marxian conceptions) and center-periphery theories of the same topic… for the sake of abolishing oppression.

Class and economic reduction are some of the worst theoretical and methodological mistakes that we can make in our analysis. Class reductionism is an understanding that the principal unit of analysis for analyzing social conditions is economic class. Other facets of social being, adorned with the dubious “superstructural”[1] labels are seen as unimportant to deal with. Economic reduction is about (1) seeing the “real”[2] determinants of social life as economic and therefore (2) understanding the “base”[3] of society as mechanically determining the elements that exist “superstructurally”. It’s an orientation that talks about inevitable moments of historical development, based on an analysis of the economic situation. When folks rail against Marxist analyses, this tends to be a recurrent target of critique. 

This approach has two big issues. While economics are important, and in some cases are good to see as “primary” in a vague sense[4], they don’t paint the full picture. Reality isn't just economic distribution, production, and consumption, even if we decide that the only “reality” we care about is human sociality. This thinking relatedly doesn't allow us to understand the full scope of what revolutionary potentialities exist by way of class analysis. Said otherwise, focusing solely on class analysis makes that mode have to do more lifting than it is capable of doing, rendering it ineffectual, like trying to make a fish win a footrace, just because it is really fast in the water. We can’t just focus on one variable or fact of interest in our analysis, if we want our analysis to capture a sense of complexity. We need the right tools for the right jobs. Alongside this, we have to always keep in mind that we exist in a dialectical relationship[5] with those tools. A separate can of worms can be opened up if we look at the ways that complex adaptive systems function—seeing the Cerberus of capitalism, modernity, and coloniality as such would illuminate that no one element of its functions is “primary”[6]. That kind of linear thinking only serves to encourage fruitless intellectual pursuits and failed revolutionary regimes. 

If the working class defined by a specific relationship with the means of production, and we have a class reductionist perspective, it can lead to us assuming ideals and extremes represent the whole[7]. We are trying to apprehend totalities with too limited of a dataset[8]. While class and economics are necessary, they are insufficient in an analysis of social conditions, and of the potential that exists for change along realistic[9] lines. 

One way for us to supersede these failure points is by way of a commitment to relationality. When I say this, I am referring to an understanding based in looking at the relationships between our loci of interest[10], in a way that prioritizes evidence (credible information sourced from the world) over hypotheses (or inductive, deductive, or abductive conclusions), with a hyper-critical and skeptical stance towards grand narratives. If there is such a thing, we, as far as we know, can only make approximations. While these can improve, even to the extent that our working models provide all that we need to engage in reality, they will always be models. This commitment isn’t modernist (building grand narratives) or postmodernist (critiquing all structures that exist and living within that critique, by way of being unable to surpass the object of critique). It is metamodernist: an orientation that is dialectical and syncretic, taking the critiques found from metamodernism seriously while believing in the existence of a reality, accessing it through a sober assessment of our capacities and limitations. 

If we want our theory, method, and practice to be based in what is by way of what we want to be, this is paramount. I see class and economic reduction as prioritizing hypotheses to rationalize with flattering evidence, rather than creating hypotheses that are based on evidence. 

A requisite part of this relationality is through having an analysis of positionality. This can be by way of intersectionality[11], interpenetration[12], and/or imbrication[13]. Positionality is an understanding of where you are located, socially, politically, and economically, by way of your identities, properties[14], and experiences. This is looking at the social hierarchies at play and seeing where you are at, in a given moment/period of focus. The "i-words" come in when we use that analysis to inform our practice, bound to a commitment to centering the marginalized. 

The center-periphery model as discussed by FARJ is a useful way to stretch class analysis, but mixing models, without explaining points of divergence before we converge can cause confusion. When we use the center-periphery model to discuss society, and an analysis that is based in intersectionality or similar frameworks talk about bringing the margins to the center, we are not asking for “representation” or “maintenance” of the structures social hierarchy as currently formatted. There is a tacit understanding embedded in this analysis that, if we are to, for example, desire a structure that empowers Black women to have multifaceted, sustaining experiences of freedom and self-determination, whatever we build would be radically different than what currently exists. This commitment is a practical way that we can “destroy” the centers of power. This is what actually allows us to (con)federalize[15] power. This is why understanding positionality is important. If each individual’s uniqueness is their own totality, having an understanding of the different elements, identities, and properties that make up who they are (in regards to it being relevant to the analysis) will allow us to see how we relate to power structures. This gives us an understanding of where to plant strategic and tactically effective action. In any given moment or situation, we might be able to take stock of if we are reinforcing or undermining concentrations of power rather than (con)federalizing of power. If, based on our social composition[16], the most marginalized folks don’t feel safe or heard, we’re doing something wrong in our practice that needs to be revised. 

To make sure we're clear, this is not to say we focus on identity “alone”. This is why we advocate for using economic and political properties along with identities in our understanding of positionality. We can't ignore any of these elements if we want a complete analysis, and centering the marginalized allows our practice to hold the most liberatory potential. Class analysis, which is what I'll call the focus of traditional/conventional leftism, broadly fixates on two things in my estimation: (1) how class interests align and contradict, leading to class conflict, class warfare, and the potentialities for abolishing class. In this vein, the other part of these potentialities is (2) how to build unity. I think that these are useful starting points, but present some issues. Since class analysis is relatively fixed and general rather than relational, it can easily lead to vulgar conclusions from the analysis, where we hyperfixate on specific, mythologized groups of folks that don't hold up to our expectations in reality. It also has the effect of the things we ask for being limited by a desire to build unity.

Unity, in this case, tends to be based on that overarching conception. “we should do this because of our objective class interests” type shit. Again, while it may be true that as economically dispossessed folks, it would be advantageous for us to have control over the means of production or whatever, that alone isn't connecting with the full breadth of how we experience our lives and has an almost Christianity-faith-based, “searching for salvation” vibe to it. “Follow me and I’ll set you free” type shit. It isn't specific enough, as classes aren't monolithic. We have to struggle through our differences, building solidarity based on a bottom-up understanding of shared needs and desires (and how those interact with and shape personal needs and desires). The unity method by way of the most general elements that unite folks is more top-down, simplifying reality in a way that isn't as useful when we're at the ground level. This makes authoritarianism the only real method of holding it together (as top down means easily lead to top down ends), creating weak movements that are vulnerable to outside actors agitating the differences that exist and are being ignored, widening fissures within the movement. Not to mention the way that people who intuitively or lucidly understand that they don't fit into that mythologized model and thus will not participate. I know that when I look at the labor movement, and see all White dudes (but I see many more kinds of embodiment when actually looking at workplaces), I feel like that’s not a place meant for me. 

If we want to have folks join our movements, we need to be more specific in our analysis, so that our practice is more accurate and aligns with the world as it is while enabling us to make it as we like. We should specify the conflicts and contradictions that exist in society so that we can see, across sectors and spaces, where the spaces for intervention can arise, or how to take advantage of the ones that exist. By having positionality and any of the “i’s” in mind, and by looking at facilitating expansive conceptions of desire[17], we can actually create movement spaces that are more holistic in their approach.

A way that this type of analysis becomes useful in multiple situations is by understanding how it can fractalize. For the sake of this conversation, we can work with the scales of Macro (class/umbrella identity), Meso (section), Micro (bloc), and Nano (individual). 

Macro is at the highest level. When looking at analyzing where someone is in society for the sake of liberatory change, the macro level is the most broad/shallow and common features of groups of people. When people talk about the rich, the proletariat, or any other classes, they are on the macro level. This is useful for us to understand “the meta”[18], and get into all of the stuff that class analysis illuminates: class antagonism, the ways that all of the -isms affect people in a broad sense, and how these things change over a broad timescale.

Meso is us zooming in a bit--instead of looking at just “classes”, used here to mean “types”, we start to understand “sections” of those classes using intersectionality and positionality with more specificity. Rather than just referring to Black people or working people, we may refer to Black young women or German working people. It is understanding that, while we are still at a high level, there is more specificity at play that is useful to have awareness of. Just like there are shared experiences of alienation from the Means of Production for all working class people, we can see how zooming in specifically allows us to see what that actually means for certain sections of whatever unifying element of a given “class”. This is able to let us know that not all workers/genders/racial communities are created monolithically, and within a given community there are sections that have their own interests due to their positionality. 

Micro is about looking at actual groups of actual people, seeing the blocs that exist within our subgroups. For example, if we're looking at Black folks, we can see how sections are composed, and we can look at the actual circumstances in an area of interest to see how different sections relate to one another, to see what contradictions are invisibilized by way of not zooming in enough. Rather than sticking at a higher level and saying that there should be unity solely due to one or two shared variables of intersection, there can be an understanding of how people are seen in society as is, with the capacity to try and shift those resonances and dissonances into more beneficial assemblages for the goals of liberation. If there are contradictions between people connected by variables found in the higher level/more general classes, we can start at a bloc level, building our way up towards people seeing and acting in their “class interests”.

Nano is zooming all the way in. It is understanding specific folks, and seeing their specific experiences intimated and imbricated by the above scales. It is easy, especially when trying to understand how to change society, to not look at individuals. But, ignoring individuals, the building blocks of society, will leave good materials on the cutting room floor. I think we should oscillate between more and less individual understandings, so that we can mutualize the relationships between individuals, collectives, and collectives of collectives.

It's worth noting that all of these are connected, and we move from one to another based on what we're trying to understand. If we're looking at the structure of society, then class analysis, in both meanings of the word, is useful. If we're trying to relate to each other as individuals, we need to think about things at that level, not eschewing an awareness of systemic dynamics. We run into a lot of issues if we don't make sure our method is well-suited to our problems that we're trying to understand.

If we can stretch the idea of class to not just be an economic thing, but to focus on positions in social hierarchies, that allows us to understand oppression on different scales from the interpersonal to the societal, and gives us room to think about what it means to be in one position or another. By framing this in ontologies and epistemologies of  Black feminisms, we come away with a flexible framework for analyzing those positions, and we can, in every situation, center the marginalized, so that we have a more specific, intentional way to expand our understanding of prefiguration and material solidarity. This points us towards uniting in ways that undermine different social hierarchies that reinforce one another. By having these tools at our disposal, we can create unified action through maximal prefiguration in our practice. If we are making something that works for the least privileged of us, we have much less work to do for the more privileged of us. This also ensures that those folks aren't left behind, the way that they can be when we don't do the work to zoom in enough. If they are at the “center”, there is no “center”. If there is a “center”, then there are marginalized people who are being ignored. 

Let’s try to concretize this with an example. Start anywhere in the process (or at any level of zoom). For clarity, we will start at the macro level. We have two classes, the exploiters and the exploited. We can then cut that up, by way of intersectionality and positionality, to see that each of these groups have subgroups that have different relations to their exploitation or exploiting. This allows us to know that broadly speaking, there are contradictions and tensions within these classes that allow us to either foster more mutuality or sow more division, depending on how we approach things. Once we are aware of this, we can zoom in more to see how, within these classes, there are blocs that add more detail to those contradictions. We can see that blocs of communities are not intrinsically unified by way of their identity[19], and this keys us into the intentionality that has to go into organizing unified action, which I recommend to be based on solidarity (bottom-up) rather than unity (top-down). We can then get to the individual level, where we try to unearth desire, in the expanded sense where someone cultivates their individuality, what I call ego, or what Lorde calls the erotic. From here, we can build back up, having a meaningful and actionable awareness of social composition that tells us how the social world exists. By way of our ideology[20] and theories[21] for how the world can change, we can develop practice that materializes into that change. 

[Notes]

[1] In Marxian theories, the superstructure is everything that sits atop the economic mode of production of society. It is everything not economic, from art, to culture, to politics, etc.

[2] As in reality, notating an importance in the physical. This is true in a broad sense, but people tend to leave out things like life belief systems and human action as important unless it relates with a very clear causality to this.

[3] The “economic foundation” of society.

[4] I’m pretty skeptical of focusing on economics unless you’re literally choosing to focus on economics, mainly because of all the ideological, theoretical, methodological, and practical baggage that comes from this. 

[5] We exist in a symbiotic (meant in the neutral sense, not the colloquial, “positive”/“beneficial” sense) process with the tools we create and deploy. As we shape the tools from our ideas, the tools shape us right back, pointing us to particular potentialities. 

[6] How can primacy exist when all of the elements operate together to create emergent outcomes? The closest we get is when, by way of our commitment to relationality, we see that certain axes of oppression rear their head in a pronounced way that is still propped up by the other axes. 

[7] This, when combined with things like Eurocentricity, leads to vulgar dynamics in political struggle, where, for example, “working class” ends up meaning “White working class”, even though POC are much more emblematic of the class.

[8] If we're going to make sweeping statements about society, we should either commit to philosophical inquiry (which doesn’t have the same need for “accuracy” in the scientific sense), or we should do rigorous analysis to understand our context, using phenomenology, sociality, history, science, and culture as our “raw” data.

[9] Changes that can actually happen in the most open sense, where we are not relying on supernatural or physics-defying feats of reality-warping for our goals. It’s a combination of inspiration and analysis, where we are simultaneously thinking about the exciting futures that we want and what we can do now to get there. This is distinct from how some employ “pragmatism”, asking people to “vote harder” or whatever. This is doing things that many people may see as idealistic or impossible, but are possible in actuality, which becomes easier to see as we move away from hegemonic understandings of potentiality.

[10] This is just a funny way of saying the stuff that we’re looking at. This could be anything: “object”, “subject”, “process”, “event”, “phenomena”, and/or “thing”.

[11] The way multiple identities intersect, creating phenomenological “coordinates” that are simultaneously similar to specific variables within that coordinate, but where that specific also creates a unique phenomenological experience that can only be dictated on its own terms.

[12] Seeing how different facets of identity are constantly shifting and bleeding into one another, based on different circumstances.

[13] Identities and social relations overlap and bump up against each other on the edges, and thus are able to be recognized as distinct but interconnected. This shows up in specific practical engagements, where a specific person’s identity, when compared to “normative” modes of being (cishet, white, male), impacts their experiences.

[14] I mean this in both senses of the word: economic property, and features. 

[15] (Con)federalism is a mode of social organization that stands in opposition to centralism. While centralism concentrates power within small groups of people and organizational bodies, (con)federalism distributes power to the grassroots level, and connects laterally and “vertically” with other organizational bodies to administer coordination. 

[16] The way a class is “composed”, through whatever collective experiences or positionalities unite everyone within. It is, based on a dialectical understanding of how the Cerberus is functioning, looking to see how we can (1) see what ways we are bound to the systems at play in a practical sense, and (2) find ways to holistically sever our selves from that binding, to create new relationships with each other, based on more communistic values. 

[17] Desire here is the (spiritual, emotional, physical, rational) needs, wants, and interests of an individual or a collective, in a given moment.

[18] I’m appropriating this term from gaming communities, meant there to talk about the toolset/features that are obviously advantageous to employ, so behavior tends to shift towards using those until the game is rebalanced towards fairness. In our case, we’ll focus on how the meta indicates relationships of power-over, leading to us needing to do the “rebalancing”. 

[19] Positionality tells us the ways that solidarity can develop by keying us into where people share or diverge in experiences based on the society in which they exist...it does not show were people's desires lie

[20] The word ideology has a negative connotation…but I think it is honest and useful. I mean it in the basic sense of our foundational assumptions and commitments, that are ideally evidence tested constantly, and revised if evidence demands it, but also allow us to continue working. 

[21] Our theories are the ideas that allow us to see if our ideology is accurate; it is the way that we build upon our foundation to see if it stands up to reality.

[scottishcommune]

Not surprisingly, New Age acolytes of ecology become authentic reductionists. “God,” “Energy,” “Being,” “Love,” “Interconnectedness,” and a whole repertoire of metaphors are invoked that serve to homogenise the particular and divest it of its richness and diversity. When this approach proves too abstract, it is always possible to create a pastiche of ill-digested “paradigms” and theories, regardless of the fact that their premises and logic may conflict with each other. Here eclecticism, which usually clouds radically different ways of thinking and the myth that we all share a “common goal,” becomes the last redoubt for sheer intellectual sloppiness.

The language that the more sophisticated systems theorists use reflects the concepts they bring to their “paradigms.” Complex results are stripped down to their most elemental levels so that they can be handled in physico-mathematical terms. That hypothetico-deductive analyses have immense value in relations that are authentically dynamic or mechanical is not in question here; their value in these domains of knowledge cannot be surpassed. What is troubling is that systems theory tends to become a highly imperialistic ideological approach that stakes out a claim to the totality of development, indeed to reason out and explain virtually all phenomena. If natural evolution, organic metabolism, and personal behavior were systems, then systems theory in all its self-fulfilling grandeur would seem to work admirably. That this “if-then” conversion (and I will have more to say about these later) denudes phenomena of many complex qualities that do not lend themselves to systems analysis is conveniently lost in a shuffle of grandiose metaphors that appeal more to an ever-yielding heart than to a demanding logical mind.

- Murray Bookchin, Thinking Ecologically: A Dialectical Approach

[cogentranting]

Just finished reading The Hidden Girl and Other Stories by Ken Liu (a short story collection) and so here is my ranking of all 19 stories

Ghost Days- I would teach this one (which would entail reading it repeatedly)

Grey Rabbit, Crimson Mare, Coal Leopard- I wish this was a full novel that I could read

The Reborn- It's a really interesting exploration of ideas about memory and identity

Maxwell's Demon- really good blending of historical fiction and fantasy/science fiction

The Hidden Girl- Fun concept, good execution. Would watch this one as a movie or short film.

The Message- A sweet character piece, and some good thematic material

Cutting- This is like a page and a half long, it's not really a story, more of a snippet of an idea but its an interesting idea

Thoughts and Prayers- this story is gut-wrenching and very effective and kind of horrifying

Real Artists- well done but far too close to real life right now to be more than depressing

Staying Behind-- of the Singularity stories this is the most interesting precisely because it's the most human

Memories of My Mother- it works and it is interesting

Altogether Elsewhere, Vast Herds of Reindeer- In the Singularity stories this one has the most affecting look at human experiences

The Gods will not be Chained- the start of this trilogy is the most interesting

A Chase Beyond the Storms- it's not a short story, it's an excerpt from the third book of a novel series, and that's what it reads like. It's not uninteresting but it doesn't stand on its own particuarly well. It dissuade me from reading that novel series but it didn't convince me either.

Dispatches from the Cradle: the Hermit-- Forty-Eight Hours in the Sea of Massachusetts- Some interesting ideas but ultimately lacks real narrative drive and thematic development

The Gods Will Not Be Slain- this trilogy and the singularity stories dragged more and more as it went on

The Gods Have Not Died in Vain- see above. Also weirdly pro-letting the machines take over?

Byzantine Empathy- way too much of this story is spent explaining cryptocurrency. Ultimately it has some interesting themes but it is super boring (and at times reads like a cryptocurrency sales pitch)

Seven Birthdays- I literally don't know what this story is about. The good parts of it are basically what Memories of My Mother did better, and then it has the boring over-explaining of Byzantine Empathy (but without being totally clear about what it's explaining or what's happening), and is the worst of the Singularity stories about having a weirdly reductionist view of humanity

Side note-- The Singularity stories, which all take place in the same world and feature a future where people's minds are digitially uploaded and a new "digital humanity" replaces human existence, all reference something called "the singularity" and after reading all six of them, I have no idea what the singularity is.

1-8 on this list are all really good and well worth reading. 9-12 are pretty good 13-17 are okay with that endorsement getting progressively less enthusiastic as you go 18-19 I don't recommend though I think 18 has a salvageable idea within it and gives glimpses of a much better version of itself

Additional thoughts: As much as I liked some of the early ones on this list, Liu's best story is Paper Menagerie and you should read that one (and that one I have taught and hope to teach again and the kids also like it)

I would not have named this collection after the Hidden Girl because that story is one of the most atypical of this collection. Most are hard sci fi and that and two others are fantasy. I think Ghost Days, Staying Behind or the Gods Will Not be Chained are all more indicative of what the book is (though I suppose mentioning ghosts or gods does give more fantasy vibes).

[osakanone]

Look at the massive amounts of money thrown at it going as far back as the 1920's -- back when science-fiction wasn't even called SF yet, back when we named micro-genres after their authors.

The idea that it ever wasn't is a retroactive fantasy invented by marketers to sell you a sense of identity, you fool.

Its marketing 101.

What you're actually talking about is maker/creator culture which historically was seen as "a geeky thing":

The idea of inventing the geek moniker and selling this idea to you that it totally encompasses you, and that to be a maker/creator is inherently geeky is just marketing.

But it wasn’t until sometime in the early 19th century that, “the Scottish word geck, meaning ‘fool,’ changed to geek and began being used to describe a certain kind of carnival performer.  - The Geek Anthropologist

-- http://blog.ongig.com/uncategorized/the-evolution-of-geek

The entire point of it was "I feel like a side-show, who's always second fiddle to someone who's inferior":

The character of Sideshow Bob in the Simpsons is a pre-70's pre-Starwars "classical" geek, right down to his speaking and mannerisms.

People did always love it, they just didn't always talk about it as if they did. Look at the classics which actually persist through the ages. They are all pretty "geeky" for their time, actually! What do you even think stage-performance culture is, like theatre-kids and muzzos? Hell even the hyper-technicality of jazz was seen as hella geeky shit in its day.

And yeah, you can also argue cultural-relativism:

That the people of today think the world has always been the way it is now right up until they get old enough to realize it isn't -- and then they get old enough again to realize that it was, actually, just not in the ways they thought.

So yes, what's actually happening is just, "the past was always", actually? The idea that it wasn't and isn't is actually the bullshit artifice of our era designed to sell you brand identity?

"The good old days" never existed!

The entire platform of nostalgia-marketing is about stealing your memories to replace them with fake ones so you can be tricked into buying shit you don't need!

AND YES, THAT EVEN INCLUDES NEGATIVE MEMORIES!

REDUCTIONIST SOLIDARITY WITH A SIMPLE "US VS THEM" NARRITIVE IS THE VERY BACKBONE OF MARKETING!

The magnitude of how much something is remembered is defined by its conversation in the present. Most of the people who obsess over Garfield now for example, did not read Garfield! And you know what? THAT'S OK!

The positive memories are the ones which persisted, and as such they tend to be the ones which define the cultural memory of a thing!

Why? Because while human negativity bias means we tend in the short to medium term remember the negative stuff more powerful, positive memories are the ones which win out overall in the long term, because they're the experiences humans are most likely to talk about when defining themselves.

Lucian's "A true story" was science fiction of its day in 2nd century AD, literally dunking on travel-logs by writing an absurdist fantasy where men get swallowed by a 300km whale, travel to outer-space, and get feminized into trees by drinking wine.

And so I'm going to write on the end of this post as they did upon Lucian:

καὶ τὸ τέλος ψευδέστατον μετὰ τῆς ἀνυποστάτου ἐπαγγελίας

And

I'll say it again:

There is no such thing as "a 7/8/9/1/20's kid"!

Its marketing designed to appeal to your deepest fears:

That you experienced what you experienced alone,

and that nobody understands you.

Don't let marketers manipulate you.

This is theft, and it is gaslighting.

Geek culture doesn't exist

For anybody who isn't aware, one of my hobbies which i've done since 1993 is engaging with ironic posts that are interesting enough with new sincerity because it always produces something weird or insightful and because its the exact opposite of what op wanted.

Picture you're at a party and someone tells a really shitty joke.

I'm the lady who plays dumb and asks someone to explain the meaning so they can't hide behind assumptions or winking.

Well its official: Geek Culture has gone mainstream

Just little warning for anyone thinking of engaging with this post: it is a type of content known as “bait” - it was created not to educate or express an opinion but merely to elicit an immediate emotional reaction (such as laughter or rage) so its viewers will instantly comment on or share it and increase the likelihood that it gets recommended to an audience outside of the original poster’s followers.

[bluepurpleviolatte]

As frustrated as one feels right now, writing ''woke is broke'' on The New York Times is totally fucked up:

There’s a big difference between constructive criticism and adopting a phrase like "woke is broke," which simplifies complex issues into a catchy but divisive slogan. It's not just about the content but how it's framed. Phrases like that are often used to attack, to mock, or to dismiss rather than to offer a thoughtful critique. When a publication like The New York Times with a history of thoughtful analysis and progressive views resorts to this kind of language, it can make you question their intentions and whether they’ve shifted their ideological position or merely adopted the language of the opposition.

Criticizing faulty policies is important, but it should be done with the recognition that solutions are complex and require nuance, not reductionist slogans. A phrase like "woke is broke" not only reduces the issue to a simplistic binary, but it also risks undermining the credibility of the arguments they're trying to make, aligning them more with populist rhetoric than with thoughtful, reasoned debate.

It’s also telling that, by using this kind of language, the publication inadvertently associates itself with certain political factions or movements, which can blur its identity and make it hard for readers to trust the editorial stance. The failure is in the wording, and it’s frustrating when language like this weakens the very arguments that need to be made about the shortcomings of any ideology or political approach.

The point is, we need to keep pushing for more thoughtful and reflective language in media, especially from outlets that we expect to uphold a certain standard.

[crimsonpublishers-medical]

Quantum Healing- A New Holistic Insight- Crimson Publishers

Quantum Healing- A New Holistic Insight- Crimson Publishers

Quantum healing is a holistic healing. If we consider human body, human body works. If we consider human body rather than as parts in treating any disease with reductionist chemical drugs yield better results without adverse effects. Human body consists of energy, each cell of human body emit photon. Most of all diseases start in human mind. Human mind has a blueprint of human body. Mindful meditation with positive thoughts in mind known as quantum thoughts, genuine intention to heal any disease creates positive energy known as quantum thinking, healing take place at spiritual level by production of endorphins. This article briefs about the basic research findings of quantum healing and its application in management of diseases.

For more open access journals in crimson publishers Please click on link: https://crimsonpublishers.com

For more articles on Research in Medical & Engineering Sciences Please click on link: https://crimsonpublishers.com/rmes/

[askgothamshitty]

I think that's why they try their hardest to mock radical feminist theory. They don't really have genuine critiques of the movement (or the theory). They don't want to deconstruct any views of sexuality or patriarchial ideals. I feel like the reason why Marxist feminism (in general) is so palatable. It tackles other forms of women's oppression and that makes it somewhat easier for them to remove male supremacy from the equation and never analyse it + it allows them to be class reductionist or dumbing down women's oppression to just "imperalism" (especially in the Global South)

This is just my general view of the situation, I could be wrong though😅

You’re totally right! Most male marxists don’t even know what radical feminism is, they just see it as the “mean” feminism. And that’s because they don’t like how it forces them to confront their role as oppressors. They’d rather cling on to a more liberal feminism that obscured that and eases their conscience.

I don’t think they like marxist feminism either, actually. They really don’t know what it is besides what Engels had to say over 100 years ago. They definitely haven’t kept up with the way it’s evolved (ask them what “social reproduction theory” is and they’ll go blank). And they certainly don’t ascribe to its values on sexual politics, which are similar to radical feminism in that they’re sex trade abolitionist.

[romanarose]

Whenever I try to talk to most of my friends about Oppenheimer, they all hated it.

It always seems like they say they lked barbie more

..... one is a comedy one is drama

I loved Oppenheimer???? I'm not saying you have to like it but saying its just a bunch of men talking is so reductionist. Like, good movies can be just talking. Maybe it's because Im a history major and i had a historical context but i didn't feel like it was hard to follow at all. I had issues keeping up with a few characters bc I'm totally face blind but I had 0 moments where i zoned out in oppenheimer, vs. i did zone out in barbie

you arent subversive for not liking oppenheimer.

[monstruous-pictures-present-blog]

📆 19 Aug 2022 📰 Innate immunity to malaria: The good, the bad and the unknown 🗞 Frontiers

Blood stage malaria manifests as a severe inflammatory disease in naïve individuals. In animal models, genetic ablation of innate sensing pathways often offer survival benefits pointing towards a role for dysregulated inflammatory signaling in innate cells in malaria pathology (80). However, reductionist co-culture systems with intact parasites generally seem to reveal nuanced responses of innate cells that often show a lack of, or reduced inflammatory signaling (54), unless parasites are added in high quantities or stimulatory ligands are purified.

To understand this seeming contradiction, a biomass comparison may be made between a Plasmodium blood stage infection, sporozoite immunization and sepsis caused by E. coli (Table 1). A blood stage Plasmodium infection can involve hundreds of billions of parasites with a total biomass of several grams. Nonetheless, such infections are frequently tolerated by the host, even in naive or semi-immune individuals. In contrast, a septicemic E. coli infection can induce a life-threatening cytokine storm with one millionth of the amount of antigen. This comparison argues that on a per-pathogen and per gram biomass basis, blood stage parasites have a relatively low inflammatory capacity as compared to bacteria. Interestingly, comparatively low numbers of sporozoites can induce sterile immunity when used as a vaccine, while 6 orders of magnitude more blood stage parasites do not suffice.

Understanding the mechanistic basis for this difference could be highly valuable. An explanation for these observations can likely be found considering the pressure that evolution exerts on host parasite interactions. This pressure likely favored different outcomes for pre-erythrocytic and blood stage parasites, especially considering their respective roles during the parasite life cycle: While only a single sporozoite needs to productively infect a hepatocyte to complete its mission, blood stage parasites need to keep proliferating in the blood for long periods of time to ensure successful uptake of gametocytes into a feeding mosquito.

Thus, blood stage parasites were subject to high evolutionary pressure to survive host sensing pathways to avoid destruction by innate or adaptive immunity. On the other hand, sporozoites might have evolved to very efficiently reach host hepatocytes while being much less manipulative regarding innate sensing pathways. Their high success rate allows only very few sporozoites to be deposited into the skin during a mosquito blood feed, limiting the amount of PAMPs to be detected and the amount of antigen available for the induction of protective immunity.

[ajsthoughtsandthings]

Is The Internet Controlling Your Life? 

There is no doubt about it...the internet has changed our lives. You only have to look at the recent COVID-19 pandemic for a ton of examples of how this technology has impacted our day-to-day. 

From video calling family and friends thousands of miles away, remote work, online schooling, and staying connected through social media, we can all think of dozens of ways we use the internet. 

Every day. 

All the time. 

Except when you sleep. (Unless you're like me and HAVE TO play tv shows or ambient videos to help you catch some quality z's). 

Technology has a hold on all of us in one way or another. Ranging from benefiting from to straight-up being addicted to the internet, everyone's lives are impacted by the internet. 

But how much power do we have over such an expansive technology? Or is it the technology controlling us? 

Who Runs the World? Technology?

If you are a Beyonce fan (and let's be honest, who isn't a little bit), you know her hit song Run the World (Girls) celebrates women as leaders and move makers.  

However, some people don't believe any humans have much say in how we live our lives. Instead, it's inevitable technological advancement that influences us. 

Technological Determinism is a theoretical framework that believes technology shapes social change and determines our future. These technological advancements bring about a new phase of human history and change things as people of the time know them. 

Marshall McLuhan's studies of the effects of mass media on thought and behavior contributed to the creation of the Technological Determinism theory. McLuhan viewed media as providing many unique environments with specific characteristics that influence people's actions and beliefs.  

This isn't too hard to see at play in our own lives, right?

The way we interact with the radio vs. a YouTube video or Podcast is different. So McLuhan was definitely onto something. 

Plus, he kind of foretold the creation of the internet way back in the 60s. So, that's pretty cool. 

Why Even Try?

Sometimes, it can feel like technology runs our lives. We've all been there. Maybe you needed some time for yourself, but the thought of turning off your phones felt impossible and selfish and left you riddled with anxiety. 

Or you may have wanted to apply for a great job, but felt nervous about your technological literacy and skipped over the job listing. 

If technology is controlling our lives, it's doing a darn good job of it. 

But hold up. It's not all doom and gloom; you do not have to submit to the AI overlords just yet. 

The Technological Determinism theory has its own limitations. 

Cons of Technological Determinism

Hard Determinism is our first gripe with the theory. Hard Determinists feel technology play's a complete and totalizing role in shaping human society. 

Using this view, all we are — our religions, culture, art, politics, relationships, etc. — are determined by technology and its advancements. 

2. This leads us to another important criticism of Technological Determinism... that it takes a reductionist approach. Aka, this theory reduces a highly complex and multilayered phenomenon into an oversimplified narrative.  It effectively ignores human's role in interactions with and the adoption of technology as individuals and a collective.  I mean, technology doesn't just spring up out of the ether. Humans do have a say in how they live their lives, right?  If you answered 'yes' to that last question, you're not the only one who thinks so.  3. Our last criticism of Technological Determinism is that it doesn't consider human free will. Humans are the ones who have to decide to create, use, and choose how a particular technology will evolve.   Those at Helpful Professor gave an example of how the internet and smartphones brought about the digital era and how, in response to the overwhelming presence of the internet, people have created a 'digital detox' movement to willingly ignore this technology and spend their time in other ways.

Image via tenor.com Still, despite the cons, there is a reason this theory is essential for us to understand.  No one can deny that technology influences our lives. So let's take a look at some of the theory's strengths. 

Pros of Technological Determinism

1. Remember the Hard Determinists we mentioned before? Well, now I'll introduce you to the Soft Determinist.  These people agree that technology has been and will continue to be a critical factor in shaping human history. However, they believe human agency, values, and institutions can influence technology development, spread, and consequences.  2. Some see the Technological Determinism theory's inclusion of these varying viewpoints as proof of the framework's adaptability and another check in the pro column.  I guess we can give them that.  3. Another strength of the theory is its application to all of history. It provides an explanation for all human societies.  We can look back at the creation of stone tools and follow it all the way to the design of AI and walk away with an answer to how we got where we are today.  And, possibly, where we'll go in the future. 

Image via knowyourmeme.com

Is the Internet Friend or Foe? 

Speaking of futures, I don't relish the idea of mine being chosen by some algorithm. Like most people, I resist the thought of my free will being stripped from me.

Even by a theory.

While I'm not arrogantly human enough to ignore how an infinite amount of factors (yes, including technological advancement) influence how I live my life, I don't wholeheartedly agree with Technological Determinism.

Image via Cinema Tweets on Twitter

At its most rigid, the definition of Technological Determinism strips away our human agency and minimizes our and our ancestor's impacts on our lives today.

I view the determinate aspect of this theory as misleading. Many people have worked tirelessly to bring us the technology we have today, even those we take for granted. Some had very big ideas about how these technologies would benefit, or sometimes even harm, us.

And I would argue humans have played a significant role in creating our societies today. Without the technologies we stumbled upon, sought out, built, cultivated, adopted, and resisted; our world could look very different.

Our fate doesn't sound predetermined to me.

And I'll continue to appreciate that I can both immerse myself in and take a break from the internet at my convenience.

But how about you? Share your opinions in the comments.

And if you want to learn more, check out Dr. USP's YouTube video on Technological Determinism here.

[elisaenglish]

Wholeness and the Implicate Order: Physicist David Bohm on Bridging Consciousness and Reality

How to “include everything coherently and harmoniously in an overall whole that is undivided, unbroken, and without a border.”

Life is an ongoing dance between the subjective reality of what it feels like to be alive, to tremble with grief, to be glad—what it feels like to be you—and the objective reality of a universe insentient to your hopes and fears, those rudiments of the imagination, the imagination at the heart of consciousness. We are yet to figure out how these two dimensions of being can be integrated into a totality. We are yet to figure out how the known physical laws can cohere with each other—relativity, the physics of the very large, is still at odds with quantum field theory, the physics of the very small—and yet to figure out how those physical laws give rise to the wonder of consciousness.

The urgency of this integration is what the physicist David Bohm (December 20, 1917–October 27, 1992) explores in Wholeness and the Implicate Order (public library).

Bohm — who devoted his life to “understanding the nature of reality in general and of consciousness in particular as a coherent whole, which is never static or complete but which is an unending process of movement and unfoldment”—writes:

“To meet the challenge before us our notions of cosmology and of the general nature of reality must have room in them to permit a consistent account of consciousness. Vice versa, our notions of consciousness must have room in them to understand what it means for its content to be “reality as a whole.” The two sets of notions together should then be such as to allow for an understanding of how reality and consciousness are related.”

Acknowledging that these immense questions might “never be resolved ultimately and completely”—that they might belong to what Hannah Arendt insisted were the unanswerable questions that make us human—he adds:

“Man’s* general way of thinking of the totality, i.e. his general world view, is crucial for overall order of the human mind itself. If he thinks of the totality as constituted of independent fragments, then that is how his mind will tend to operate, but if he can include everything coherently and harmoniously in an overall whole that is undivided, unbroken, and without a border (for every border is a division or break) then his mind will tend to move in a similar way, and from this will flow an orderly action within the whole.

[…]

The way could be opened for a world view in which consciousness and reality would not be fragmented from each other.”

A generation after the Swiss philosopher Jean Gebser contoured a view of this unfragmented reality in his notion of “the ever-present origin,” Bohm considers what arriving at such a holistic view would take:

“Our general world view is itself an overall movement of thought, which has to be viable in the sense that the totality of activities that flow out of it are generally in harmony, both in themselves and with regard to the whole of existence. Such harmony is seen to be possible only if the world view itself takes part in an unending process of development, evolution, and unfoldment, which fits as part of the universal process that is the ground of all existence.”

Such a way of viewing reality, Bohm argues against the grain of our reductionist culture, requires fully inhabiting all aspects of the mind, including those that elude the clutch of quantification:

“The proper order of operation of the mind requires an overall grasp of what is generally known not only in formal, logical, mathematical terms, but also intuitively, in images, feelings, poetic usage of language, etc… It is needed for the human mind to function in a generally harmonious way, which could in turn help to make possible an orderly and stable society… This requires a continual flow and development of our general notions of reality.

[…]

A new kind of theory is needed which drops these basic commitments and at most recovers some essential features of the older theories as abstract forms derived from a deeper reality in which what prevails is unbroken wholeness.”

In the remainder of Wholeness and the Implicate Order, Bohm goes on explore how the relationship between thought and reality illuminates the way this unbroken wholeness is enfolded within each region of space and time. Complement it with Iain McGilchrist on how we render reality and John Muir on the transcendent interconnectedness of the universe, then revisit Bohm on creativity, the paradox of communication, and how we shape reality.

Source: Maria Popova, themarginalian.org (25th May 2023)