#no one cares if i live or die even among leftists

[natandacat]

Theres no words that can describe the complete alienation of having severe long covid. One infection, caused directly by political decisions to remove public measures, and i cant walk. Can't stand except on really good days which are getting rarer. Sitting is a privilege i dont always have. Cognitive work is too much of a risk to consider for the moment. I live in constant fear of going back to being utterly bed ridden in the sense that i cant even feed myself, drink water, speak, move my limbs beyong my fingers and toes. For days and days without relief.

Nothing feels real. Every gain can be lost in a literal second. And on top of this, the fear of reinfection. The very real possibility of death, given how weak a single infection has made me when I was healthy and young. The even more real possibility of a worsened state, where there are no good days. That means death, too. If i am constantly in a state where I cannot move, i am going to have to resort to euthanasia because it is not a bearable existence. I can barely tolerate it when it know it will end. Last time was 14 days and I am still so traumatized by it 2 months later nothing feels real.

And on top of that, i am being told that my life doesnt matter. Covid is not a real concern. Let it fester. Even if the stairs in my building didnt lock me in, all public spaces have become lethal to me. I cant see my friends because they cant avoid exposure when theres a wave. To love me, you must live in a horrific world where no matter how many precautions you take, no matter how much they ostracize you, you might still cause my death.

Covid is a privileged issue they say. Im not even in the room for it bc i cannot be in the room. You can move your body, youre not afraid of death, you havent lost everything that makes you *you*, but im the privileged one. I cant even emote the way i used to. If i get too excited, too happy, i cant move. I talked to countless people who cant work anymore, are losing their jobs their houses their partners their immigration permits but no. Covid doesnt matter. I dont matter. Everyone cheered when i got covid bc they got to party for new years eve. I hope it was a good party. I will never agree that it was worth my life.

For the past 2 years ive had to share classrooms with students and professors who know everything about my story, who have seen how disabled i am by long covid, who ive begged to mask. They all refuse to mask. And i have to sit there and pretend its not a cosmical level farce that theyre talking about social justice and ethics and just what good people they all are. Not to mention that most of them have revealed themselves to be zionists. I have to sit next to an iof soldier and act as if its ok that she gets to sit in this classroom, except im not even sitting in the room because cases are too high and im too weak to be there physically anyway, so im on zoom. At least i get to remove my earbuds when she speaks so i dont have to think about the atrocities she has committed.

[lith-myathar]

.

[qqueenofhades]

The thing that confuses me about the "don't vote" left (not the "I don't want to vote", I'm talking explicitly the "don't vote" left. I don't agree with the "I don't want to vote" left either but I can understand their logic) is they lose me at the final step of the logic. I've tried to connect the logic here, even if I don't agree with a political position I do try to understand where people are coming from (empathy for someones situation is not the same as cosigning it), but I just can't connect the dots here in a way that isn't deeply cruel. Does United States politics prioritize the lives of those in the US (and often white) over those in the Global South? Yes, it's a fucking atrocity. We should continue to make noise about it, cus Biden has used less drones and that shows progress, even if it's not enough. The part where I lose the plot is where the conclusion to this injustice is to let even more people die? Cus that's kinda how I see the idea of not voting: I can pick between shit and more shit, and at the end of the day, I'm picking whoever allows the most people to make it to the next day. Given Trumps stance on everything but specifically climate change, I feel like Biden is pretty significant harm reduction.

I don't think both things can't be true: that every life lost is a travesty we should not forget AND the more people we can save is worth fighting for.

The thing is, I have seen nothing among the "don't vote" far left (and I am talking here specifically about the people who both loudly announce their intention not to vote and try to convince others to do the same) to convince me that they actually care about harm reduction or stopping genocide. They only care about what makes them look the most Correct and/or superior to the Democrats. They yelled bloody murder about Obama using drones, they went dead quiet about Trump using them even more (even when he nearly started WWIII by assassinating the Iranian general Soleimani with one), and then said nothing at all when Biden reduced the drone program to almost nothing and withdrew the US from a failed war in Afghanistan it had long ago lost. Now they will yell all day about Israel/Hamas (something that Biden did not start and has had no direct military role in responding to) but they don't care about Russian genocide of Ukraine and Syria, Chinese threats to invade Taiwan, etc, because those governments are "anti-western/anti-American" and therefore should be defended. Their opposition to human suffering is extremely conditional and rests on whether they can look good out of it, and they never interrogate the hypocrisies of their own ideology.

Likewise: every country in the world prizes its own citizens above those of other countries. It's just a basic fact. Yes, the US has a grim history of intervening in other countries and causing untold civilian damage (especially during the Cold War and then in post-9/11 War on Terrorism). Yes, that legacy is complex and needs to be acknowledged. But literally none of that will be fixed, not to mention all the vulnerable people in America itself who will be punished, by Trump getting into power again. Biden is not just a grudging "lesser evil," but has done a lot of truly good and helpful things, regardless of the Online Leftists' constant lies, misinformation, and misrepresentation. If you spend all your time announcing what a champion you are for non-American marginalised people and/or those undergoing terrible suffering, and then deliberately and knowingly adhere to a course of action that will increase that suffering tenfold not only for those people but your own neighbors, friends, and family, then no, I don't believe you are a brave champion of social justice. You just want to know what categories of people you can gleefully and righteously punish and make to suffer for not believing the same things as you, that makes you just as dangerous as the right-wing fascists, and I can and will call out your ass accordingly.

[kick-a-long]

"look at those haircuts, clothing and body types. those aren't leftists" WHAT THE FUCKK

ok, this is very important to me:

those men have military style hair cuts, short and neat, and they have pressed and laundered all black cloths. in the case of the dude on the left he has expensive and European looking cloths with a spotless luxurious leather jacket and trendy drop pants. he's also a natural blond or rich enough to not have blond roots showing. he's dressed expensive.

the guy on the right is dressed like he shops at the stores most people can afford or lower. they are matching, so they coordinated before hand.

if you look at their body types they are very different. the guy on the left is very clean cut, slender and looks camera ready. he is at this protest in front of a camera and he could not care less. he's relaxed and unbothered by being on film. this implies some level of experience being on film. he also has the rubber gloves on which is wiiieeeerrrd.

now the guy on the right in both his attitude about being on camera and his body type looks like he works a lower paying job and is excited to be seen. he works out A LOT and is unafraid/excited to be associated with hezbollah. and not just that, he is BURLY AND TALL. that guy looks like he works at a job with a lot of physical requirements. he doesn't eat or shop or live where the other guy does. he isn't a body builder bulking, he looks strong in a practical way. you may not have ever seen a bouncer but that guy looks way bigger and more physically active than a bouncer.

so these two people who previously knew each other, together on their own, even if they are leftists fringe enough to have those kinds of jobs, that's strange. it's strange that they would be standing in the park holding a pro terrorist sign and one of them is kinda bored about it. unless their jobs some how both intersect with being pro terrorist. ask yourself where do two guys from different economic backgrounds and VERY extreme opinions meet up? they are older than college age. they don't even look like they are the same age. they don't look like they have the same amount of free time, they don't even look like they should know each other. the most logical conclusion in my mind is that are both neonazis and one is on the media side and the other is his back up.

also... like why are you so die hard about people who support hezbollah and their sex trading racist asses being possible leftists? these two men, whoever they are, are shameful to be associated with. i never said they were ugly or good looking, frankly it's a moot question to me because they scare the absolute living daylights out of me for all the reasons above AS WELL AS THAT THEY ARE IN MY CITY AND CARRYING A SIGN SUPPORTING TERRORIST SEX SLAVERS.

what people look like says A LOT about their background and who they want you to see them as. there's a lot you can't change for a casual one day thing. you are saying I'm putting a value judgment on that, i am telling you the information you can pick up from it. you do this all the time when you think to yourself, "that person looks like a cop or a narc." or "that person looks gay enough to ask out." if they only had access to cloths that were in vouge for leftist, looked like they lived lifestyles that are popular with leftists, with leftist jobs, with hair styles that were popular among leftists, even in plain black cloths i would be less sure.

stop pretending like you can't tell things about people by looking at the way they present themselves for moral purity points. these dudes are fucking dangerous to anyone around them, life itself, and I'm dead serious when i tell you and anyone who will listen to look out for monsters like this.

[shadowmaat]

NeverBidens

We're on a fast track to another Trump presidency. It was already going to be a dicey situation given his popularity among the white power groups, the antiqueer extremists, the misogynists, xenophobes, terrorist militias, and ultraconservative Christians.

Unfortunately, there's another equally large group throwing themselves in the mix. People who claim to be leftists, but whose beliefs align more with the alt-right than anything on the liberals side.

The NeverBidens use Biden's involvement with Israel over Palestine as a rallying cry to oust him. They're furious over the genocide taking place in Palestine and think the only way to "save" those people is to get rid of Biden.

"We need to send a message to Dems!" they claim. This has never worked in modern history, of course, and has led to an increase in suffering when attempts have been made, but that hardly matters. Whether it's refusing to vote at all or wasting a vote on a third party, their goal is the same as MAGA's: get Trump installed as president.

Why? Well, some of them say that Trump can "hardly be worse" than Biden, which shows a significant memory failure, if true. Others have flat-out stated that their goal is to destroy the US: burn it all down and start over from the ashes. This is, they claim, the only way to "fix" the country. I'm beginning to believe that this is what all of them want, no matter what excuses they make or lies they tell themselves.

Some of them may claim that no, this isn't about killing the US, it's about saving Palestinians, but if that were true they'd voting for the guy who is at least starting to waffle a bit rather than the guy who thinks Benji should "finish the job already."

The ones willing to admit they want the violent destruction of the US are also aware that this will lead to countless deaths, both in the US and across the world. It's a "necessary sacrifice" to achieve the "better world" they envision, and they're willing to throw all of us onto the pyre of their beliefs.

This is part of why I say that NeverBidens are a death cult: whether they're willing to admit it or not, they know a lot of innocent people are going to die, and they either want that or don't care as long as they "win." Many of them may not even care what comes next as long as the rest of us are punished: for allowing the country to get this bad, for voting Biden into office in the first place, for not managing to fix everything already.

Do the people calling for the death of the US honestly believe something better will take its place? Or do they just want the country to die and don't care what happens next? Hard to say. I'm sure some of them could probably outline grand plans for a better future, one where everyone is treated equally and nothing bad ever happens and all is wonderful and perfect, but that isn't the same as believing it's possible. And it isn't the same as being able to successfully implement those plans without any hiccups or dissent.

As an aside, I remember reading about a group of disenfranchised fic fans who decided they'd had enough of AO3's lenient content policies and decided to start up their own perfect archive: one where Immoral Content™ was forbidden and all the creepy perverts on AO3 wouldn't be allowed.

Which might have worked well if they had been able to agree on the specifics of the immoral content and where to draw the lines. Except, y'know, everyone has their own opinions on "immoral" and eventually the arguing got so bad that the project was abandoned.

Anyway! NeverBidens are a death cult. A lot of them get angry when you point that out. No, no, they don't want more people to die, they want the Palestinians to live! How, exactly, that's supposed to be accomplished with Trump as president remains vague and undefined. And even if, by some miracle, Trump suddenly decided to stop sending Israel money and weapons, A) I'm pretty sure Benji could continue to cause damage without us (we're his biggest supporter, not his only one), and B) what about the rest of the world? What about the genocides in Sudan, Ukraine, Afghanistan, etc? What about the hellscapes in the DR Congo? Haiti? Nigeria? Mass death and violence is happening in so many places across the world, not just Palestine.

While Palestine deserves to be recognized, so do all the other people who are suffering. And yeah, the US is going to get significantly worse under Trump, too. As is planned. As is desired by certain factions, including the NeverBidens. But hey, a little mass death, stripped rights, global suffering, and terrorism is better than letting Biden remain in office, right?

[dogsliampaynedoesntinstagram]

Hi Ralph. I hope you’re doing as well as you can be and I thank you for being so patient with all of us.

As someone who’s been involved in social justice movements, organizing etc, how do you deal with confusion, conflicting feelings, and nuance? And how do you handle a potential disagreement with a close friend about it? Also I’m sorry that this is long. I’m thinking out loud and I don’t expect you to answer the questions or even the anon. It’s more to represent my conflicting thoughts and I was wondering how you deal with this kind of thing. Obviously I’m not struggling compared to people there, or the majority of people anywhere, but I thought you might relate, maybe?

My friend (she’s fifty years older and like a grandma to me) is Jewish and supports Israel completely, is a democrat. She’s brilliant, funny, has her phD, has traveled, knows Palestinians, dated one while living in Europe, etc. She said that he believed that members of groups like Hamas cared more about glory and freedom than the health of their people. We were talking about pro-Palestine tweets among Taylor fans. She said she hopes someone like Taylor would come forward supporting Israel and condemning Hamas. I agreed with her aloud even though I don’t agree. How would you deal with this situation?

I’m conflicted about Israel/Palestine. I don’t know if Hamas cares about regular Palestinian lives. I wonder how many Palestinians they thought would die after Israel retaliates. It’s almost as if they’re provoking an even worse humanitarian crisis. But then Israel provoked the creation of Hamas. Im revolted by the excessive bombing and use of white phosphorus. Who I am to judge Hamas, really? But I judge them anyway. I can’t fathom what’s happening to Palestinians.

It’s absolutely understandable that Jews wanted their own country after the Holocaust. I think if the majority of major religions have countries, it’s important that Jews have one too. I don’t think Israel’s an invalid state but I think it’s run by a terrible man and I don’t like much of what they do. It bothers me when people online call it “isntreal.” Aldo I don’t get why they say Israel didn’t exist until 1949 because that land is referred to in the Bible as Israel? Are Israelis and Jews more indigenous to the land than Palestinians if the Jews were there thousands of years ago? How do people declare who’s the most indigenous? Some people think the Jews are taking their land back? Some people think Hamas is a resistance movement? But justification of terrorism is horrifying. It’s not like there was a vote in Palestine to decide whether to attack Israel. If there were, and the majority voted to hurt Israel, Israel would have more justification. But it’s terrifying that Hamas has decided they represent everyone. So many more Palestinians are dying because Hamas gave israel justification to kill more. Israel’s treatment of Gaza will radicalize more young people into joining organizations like Hamas. It’s a disaster.

Iran’s involvement makes me suspicious. I think they want Israel destroyed and don’t care about Palestinians. Why would they care about Palestinians when they murder or arrest women who don’t “properly” cover their hair? But also, the US helped overthrow Iran’s last democratic leader? But also it’s important for israel to exist to have a democratic ally in the Middle East?

I’m 18 and I’m trying to learn everything I can before making judgments. Did you feel conflicted like this when you were younger? Do you still feel like this? I think social media has made it even more confusing. I can’t tell what’s reliable and what’s not. But also, how would someone allegedly live-tweeting from Gaza prove that they’re reliable? Why should they have to? How do you decide what to trust or not trust?

I’m especially worried about American republicans who appear to be supporting Palestine only because Biden supports Israel. I’m worried that young leftists will begin to trust these republicans because they agree with the republicans on one international issue. So many young people supporting Israel are retweeting a man who’s pinned tweet is about how he had a great time chatting with tucker Carlson. That man supports palestine because he wants to prove that Biden is evil or incompetent etc. How does one trust anyone in government ever? I’m worried Biden will lose the 2024 election because of his support for Israel will cost him the support of democrats. And then we’ll end up with someone astronomically worse.

Thank you.

Also just for anyone reading, I listened to this amazing podcast about the history of Israel/Palestine. It was published in September and august of this year so it isn’t colored by the recent events and subsequent/sudden pity for Israel. I like especially the explanation about how Israelis and Palestinians have different names for the same event. It can be the worst day ever or the best day ever, depending on who you are

https://open.spotify.com/episode/2uaV7mS3cTEKITWp7T3JL2?si=aYXRTgRCTJSBXNaHDyH-qw

Thanks so much for your thoughts anon - sending you all the love as you make sense of the world. It took me a long time to figure out what I thought about Israel and Palestine and at times I felt it was too complicated and found the way people talked about Israel stressful, even when I was on Palestinian solidarity protests.

You don't have to have this all figured out to take action. You think the current actions of the Israeli state are terrible - that's enough to take action in solidarity with Palestinians. I really encourage you to do what you can in this week - you don't need to have untangled and resolved everything to take solidarity action.

In terms of the advice you were asking for - my main point is that it's OK that you feel confused and unclear and give yourself time to figure out almost all of this. You will learn more about Israel and Palestine with time. It's OK to take time to figure out how to have friends with people who you disagree with and who pressure you to agree. You will figure out that with time - and my only advice is to give yourself time. The only urgency right now is to take action in solidarity with Palestine - and you can do that with all the confusion and ambiguous feelings you have.

For the rest - rather than trying to respond to everything you say - I'm going to focus on two specific ideas. There are beliefs that seem to underlie what you say and where I understand things very differently. I am offering these alternative ways of understanding the world as a way of showing how I see things. I don't know if they'll speak to where you're coming from or not, but they seemed like a good place to start.

The first is that I don't think religions having countries is a good thing - it's a cause of horrendous oppression and injustice. There are all sorts of examples from history of this idea (the reformation), but I think one particularly good and recent example is the partition of India and the consequences that flow down through till today.

It's easy, I think, for things to be naturalised or talked about as if they are natural - and so when people say oh X is OK because it's an example of Y - there can be a lot of ignorance about Y, which is actually terrible. I think being clear eyed about what ethnic or religious national states are actually like (and have been like) really helps see through some of the false equivalence that goes on with Israel.

You might have seen an anon come back twice and say 'don't you think Jewish people should have a state' and treat this as if the answer was obviously yes. If you understand what it means to say that only this group of people who live in this land should control the state that rules over it, then it becomes very clear why the answer should be no - and that's not a statement about Jewishness, but about the nature of states.

The second is that I disagree with your understanding of indigeneity in a way that is quite important - and might be useful. As you probably know I've spent most my life in New Zealand and that shapes how I see settler colonisation and resistance to it.

There's a simple rendition of the idea of indigeneity - which is the people who have had the longest connection with a particular piece of land are indigenous and therefore should be able to control what happens to it (or the other side where you look back and see who has the longest connection with land to decide who is right) - really quickly unravels and there's lots of the world where it would lead to supporting terrible things.

The alternative is to see that people become indigenous as a result of the process of dispossession through settler colonialism. Before settler colonies there are no indigenous people - there are just people who live places - just like there have been people who lives places all over the world for as long as there have been people

Settler colonisation is a way of controlling land and resources - and it's different from other sorts of imperialism. In the Americas, and later in New Zealand and Australia resources were taken by new societies that were built where people were already living. This was only possible because huge numbers of people were moved to that land on the basis of a promise that they would have access to land that they wouldn't have otherwise (alongside an ideology that the land they are claiming is their right). Settler colonialism is the process of taking over a society by offering people access to resources, particularly land, to move to the new place (in the Americas obviously there was also the forcible movement of enslaved people in addition to settler colonisation, but it is this movement of free people that characterises settler colonisation). It is the combination of offering inducement to move people, and using those people to maintain power, that makes settler colonisation different from other forms of migration. It's only in the face of settler colonialism that people who are living their lives become indigenous people.

That is the sense in which Palestinians are indigenous to the land of Israel - they were dispossessed from their land and homes by people who lived elsewhere and moved with the assistance of the state and the intention to displace them. It's not about the ancient history of who deserves the land in some kind of mystical way - it's about a very specific (and in this case recent) history of intentional dispossession. I think the way that appeals the bible are used to obscure the very recent history is really well captured by Michael Rosen's poem Promised Land.

The final thing I want to say is to respond to your characterisation of that podcast. Because my response to what you said was to think: 'what a great summary of why it's impossible to support the state of Israel'. I don't think mine or anyone else's freedom or liberation can be built through the oppression of others. One of the most basic building blocks of my politics is the idea of solidarity 'an injury to one is an injury to all'. It's not at all unusual for horrors on one people to be a source of triumph for another - but I believe none of us have a chance unless we can build a different sort of world that is based on solidarity as opposed to fighting over scarcity. If a great joy for one people, is a catastrophe for another - it's a really clear sign that that great joy is not something that I can support politically.

[rigginsstreet]

Hi! Thank you so much for answering my ask re Trump. I wanted to let you know that you're not alone---I'm center-left, a lot closer to being a moderate and centrist than a far left progressive, and even as someone who'd literally die before voting for Trump or most of today's other Republicans, some of the virtue signaling and performative BS among the left makes me ill! The ongoing purity test among some, like "well, if Kamala isn't radical left on every single issue that I've decided to care about (or at least reblog about) this week, I'll just not vote at all and let Trump win" is not just gross but self-defeating and absurd! And lol re people here thinking that reblogging certain posts on Tumblr makes someone a "good person" or really makes any difference at all. So let's just say I get it :) I'm Jewish, so the blatant antisemitism among some of the far left makes me even more reluctant to align with them. Anyway, we can start a support group for people who hate Trump and most of the right but can't stand a lot of the posturing on the left either, my friend :)

I always joke that I’m too liberal for conservatives and too conservative for leftists lmao like I really don’t relate to any conservative ideals but I’ve deadass seen people on this website speculate someone’s a trump supporter because they didn’t agree with certain leftist ideologies and that’s just beyond absurd to me. It’s why I can’t engage in online politics because no one’s living in reality

People will disagree with you. People will have different takes. This does not inherently make them a bad person

[tummy-hurts]

I want to articulate something but it'll be difficult, I don't have the words. Whenever people use the words 'crazy' or 'insane' to describe someone (in a like, derogatory way and not as the function of an increasing word like 'very') it's always like. "What do you mean when you say that. What do you think that means. Can you think about it for one minute." Like, it doesn't mean anything, just an abstraction of mental illness/distress that people feel comfortable calling someone when they're bothering them, or they don't understand their actions, or viewpoints, or just as a replacement for 'malicious'. It's so careless and there's literally always something better to say in those situations.

Anyways, there's another sense of the word 'crazy' that I think about a lot that doesn't have to do with mental illness. Or maybe does because environment is such a big part of it, and also it can be hard to separate things that might have just happened anyways and things that are due to environment or experience. So maybe mental health is a better way to say that. But it's like Lovecraft, but also not like that at all because fuck that guy. But it's seeing the horrors that are there that so many people don't. Like, the contradictions in society, the discrepancies, the atrocities, also sometimes just caring. Atrocities governments have committed or are committing that are public knowledge that people just ignore or don't believe, ongoing things people decide aren't their business, and governments getting to say one thing and do another, just completely lying about their goals and values while doing anything they want to shredding and making a mockery of any moral stance. And that people and their organizations play along with such a flimsy charade??? So much of what goes on in this world is nothing, it's an empty pretend play that results in incomprehensible amounts of unnecessary suffering.

Same for everything with covid and the current pandemic, but which also reveals things ongoing about healthcare and health and perceptions of disability. The fact that so much of society just ignores an ongoing pandemic, the lying from organizations that people look to for guidance, but then even the willful ignorance and cognitive dissonance when confronted with evidence in their lives that maybe things aren't okay, or directly confronted by people telling them that there's something they're ignoring and that maybe they should prioritize safety over comfort. There's so many factors, people just don't know, but there's so much resistance for so many ingrained reasons that are again, just nothing. There's no good reason for any of this. So many people dying and going to die and the brain damage and every single organ. People just keep ignoring it like it'll go away. And especially especially it's inconceivable among people who should know better. People who are 'leftists' and would say they cared about disabled people or say they cared about other people in general, community, the contradictions in so many of them just ignoring it too. I saw someone say something recently like "The hole of disability justice in common leftism is eclipsing." It's true, there's no collectivist care as soon as it becomes a little bit inconvenient. And if you take into account covid's effects, and the history of similar disease, namely HIV/AIDS, I really don't know how many humans are going to be left on this planet after another 6-10 years. But that's ridiculous to say, that's crazy! But!!! How else could it go? HIV takes 10 years on average to become deadly, with some earlier, and covid does even faster immune damage, it might not even take ten years. Some HIV infections become AIDS sooner than that though, which is already happening. And in order to effectively treat HIV you need to catch it and treat it early, if you wait until it's already bad then you can't do as much. What would the AIDS crisis of the 80s have been like if HIV was airborne and the majority of people on the planet caught it multiple times in the 70s before it was even known what was going on???

You see? It's crazy, it makes you feel crazy to see all this stuff that doesn't even exist to most people! Especially struggling with pre-existing psychosis, it's easy to feel like the things you know can't be right, that you're mistaken somehow, but it's true and it's a problem with everything going on in this world, and not an individual, pathologized, problem. But it's so easy for these things to feel blended, and to adopt the words that people say about people like you and consider them proudly. Anyways, this is a completely idiosyncratic way of thinking about this word and concept, and probably not that many people think about it the same way. Just a bunch of thoughts that make me feel like I'm going to lose it. And ultimately, I don't care about any of this, and would just like to escape all of it, it's miserable, I hate this place.

[all-things-are-nothing-to-me]

Blessed be the Lord Who Gifts Us With His Bountiful Employment

In a world revolving around work, The Economy is venerated — treated as a hallowed, divine being. Every moment spent engaged in play, in idleness or in unprofitable creative pursuits is a penny we steal from the almighty economy. Anyone who lacks the will or capability to keep up their productivity is thus seen as sinning against the true deity of our age: The Economy is our one true god and has been for decades. And he’s a vengeful god. Anyone who sins against him will be pushed into the gutters of society by his clergymen and left to rot and die.

There’s nothing The Economy savors more than his clergy taking sinful unproductive workers and sacrificing them to him, that’s the entire reason homelessness and prisons are such integral features of capitalist civilization.

The booming mantra of our God can be heard chanted all across the globe — Work or die — Work or die — and when you eventually reach breaking point and actually die —be sure to do it very publicly so that the other worshipers are forced to look upon your misery to witness what happens to workers who fail to keep up with the grind. They’ll try not to notice, but they’ll see the destitution from the corner of their eye and it’ll further instill the fear of God in them.

Work or die — Work or die — Work or die. It’s the chorus that rings in our ears almost every moment of our lives, even our “free time” being wholly consumed by the specter of work. We’re no longer capable of relishing the simplicity of existence, instead we measure our productivity during every waking moment and punish ourselves if we don’t measure up to our peers. A good worker is always finding ways to develop their skills and increase their usefulness to the machine. A good worker is forever climbing the hierarchy so they can one day join the ranks of the saintly clergy and strike down the no good lazy bums beneath them for their disgusting under-performing.

The modern anti-work movement was spawned in the late 20th century by anarchist Bob Black. Black spent years of his life pushing back against the conservative 19th century notions of productivity, industrialism and human-commodification that came from both capitalist and communist (including anarcho-communist) scholars and practitioners. He was especially frustrated to see fellow anarchists refuse to part ways with the miserable work-culture they inherited from the miserable workers that gave life to them.

Bob Black:

Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. Almost any evil you’d care to name comes from working or from living in a world designed for work. In order to stop suffering, we have to stop working. [...]

Liberals say we should end employment discrimination. I say we should end employment. Conservatives support right-to-work laws. Following Karl Marx’s wayward son-in-law Paul Lafargue I support the right to be lazy. Leftists favor full employment. Like the surrealists — except that I’m not kidding — I favor full unemployment. Trotskyists agitate for permanent revolution. I agitate for permanent revelry. But if all the ideologues (as they do) advocate work — and not only because they plan to make other people do theirs — they are strangely reluctant to say so. They will carry on endlessly about wages, hours, working conditions, exploitation, productivity, profitability. They’ll gladly talk about anything but work itself.

These experts who offer to do our thinking for us rarely share their conclusions about work, for all its saliency in the lives of all of us. Among themselves they quibble over the details. Unions and management agree that we ought to sell the time of our lives in exchange for survival, although they haggle over the price. Marxists think we should be bossed by bureaucrats. Libertarians think we should be bossed by businessmen. Feminists don’t care which form bossing takes so long as the bosses are women. Clearly these ideology-mongers have serious differences over how to divvy up the spoils of power. Just as clearly, none of them have any objection to power as such and all of them want to keep us working.

A workerist is any person who advocates for ideologies, systems and lifestyles that revolve around work. This includes every liberal, rightist, democratic socialist, social democrat, centrist, communist and fascist in the world. These are all staunchly workerist, industrial ideologies that strive to sell us the idea that humans and other animals exist to work on the assembly line, to extract resources and manufacture goods for the market, to be loyal servants to the revered productive forces. They all see the world through the same productivity-oriented, industrial lens, only with the tint slightly adjusted.

When Bob Black wrote The Abolition of Work in 1985 and called for “a collective adventure in generalized joy and freely interdependent exuberance”, he wasn’t proposing we give work a glossier tint to make it more democratic, merit-based or financially rewarding. He wasn’t proposing we hustle and invest in The Economy (praise be) to become wealthy enough to one day make passive income as landlords and shareholders. He was proposing we part with work in totality. Tear down all structures of work and kick all those who uphold those soul-crushing structures in the shins repeatedly until they let go.

This point is completely missed by the stale leftists who have appropriated this very anarchist concept and tried beating it into submission. They’ll forever be ready to seize hold of and immediately neuter anarchist ideas when they see them picking up any kind of steam. But the left will never be anti-work. It would go against everything the left exists to serve.

The entire labor movement — the unions, the socialist parties, the academics and Twitter theorists, are all wholly dedicated to building the load-bearing walls of their power-base: the ideology of work. Without workers and workplaces, there is no endlessly rotating left versus right race and everything both sides of the aisle depend on to satisfy their power and wealth machinations crumbles into rubble. Leftist organizers who try to redefine anti-work to mean “work-but-with-bigger-unions” are opportunistic weasels.

Likewise, anti-work is not a program to build stronger welfare states with universal basic incomes that subsidize the work-industrial complex and thus calm the growing urge to revolt; prolonging The Economy’s pillaging of our ecosystems and making us depend on the managers of productivity even more than we do now.

Being anti-work is desiring to bulldoze the offices, warehouses, farms, construction sites, restaurants and supermarkets that hold us all captive, push it all into a giant pile of glittering rubble, light a brilliant bonfire and sing and dance and fuck all night as the sweet fumes of a million copiers and filing cabinets fill the air.

Anti-work is the wholesale rejection of an obscenely traumatic and perverse way of life that we’ve been collectively conditioned into accepting as normal almost from birth, when we were pulled from our mother’s tit and thrown into a preschool so she could get back to the office.

So what happens after the bonfire dies down and we depart a work-based existence for a play-based one?

Bob Black:

Play isn’t passive. Doubtless we all need a lot more time for sheer sloth and slack than we ever enjoy now, regardless of income or occupation, but once recovered from employment-induced exhaustion nearly all of us want to act.

The point of anti-work, stripped of all the garbage leftist and Marxist ideology that’s been rapidly consuming it (I blame Graeber for kickstarting this process), is to treasure your fleeting existence and spend it doing things you want to do. Not things your bosses force you to do by threatening to sacrifice you to the great Economy in the sky if you don’t follow their script.

Anti-work is the burning desire to free yourself from that cacophonous workerist mantra forever ringing in your ears, to stop playing the subservient role assigned to you by The Great Economy and instead forge your own path and find real purpose through joyful play.

Henry Miller:

The world only began to get something of value from me the moment I stopped being a serious member of society and became—myself. The State, the nation, the united nations of the world, were nothing but one great aggregation of individuals who repeated the mistakes of their forefathers. They were caught in the wheel from birth and they kept at it until death—and this treadmill they tried to dignify by calling it “life.” If you asked anyone to explain or define life, what was the be-all and end-all, you got a blank look for an answer. Life was something which philosophers dealt with in books that no one read. Those in the thick of life, “the plugs in harness,” had no time for such idle questions. “You’ve got to eat, haven’t you?”

Anti-work is the pursuit of happiness in your own terms. A life you actually desire, choices you make as an individual, unhindered by the suffocating demands of mass society.

Anti-work is the refusal to accept the authority of bosses and economists, even if you have to make do with simpler meals and uglier furniture than the working stiff next door. It’s seeing the macabre construct of a work-based existence for what it really is and reaching out to reclaim your uniqueness before your brief existence on this planet ends. It’s unleashing your long-buried feral fighting spirit and finding out who you really are under the decades of rigid indoctrination by tie-wearing yesmen.

Anti-work is the urge to smash every temple of The Great and Mighty Economy (hallowed be his name) and kill all his clergy before our bodies and minds start to fail and it’s our turn to be sacrificed to him.

Anti-work, friends, is anarchy.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Who owns the covid vaccines?

A key idea from sf is “all laws are local, and no law knows how local it is.” Prisoners of our own time and place, it’s hard not to feel like we’re living in the only possible world, is if everything around us is inevitable and natural — and any change is “unnatural.”

But anyone who’s ever dabbled in multi-agent modeling (sims where “individuals” each have their own goals and aversions) knows there are lots of stable configurations that a big, complex system can fall into, and re-rerunning the same sim produces wildly different outcomes.

14 months ago, we hit STOP on our big, complex system and now the US is about to hit START again. It will not be a return to “normalcy,” because the old normal wasn’t inevitable. There are lots of other ways we could get along. And frankly, the old normal sucked.

A key way in which Old Normal sucked was the way that monopolists were able to style themselves as heroic entrepreneurs whose great rewards were commensurate with their great risks — when in reality, the risks were always socialized and only the gains were privatized.

That’s an area where a new normal is long overdue, and that new normal is being born in the controversy over public access to covid vaccines.

Helping the poor world manufacture its own vaccines is the obvious right thing to do.

Not just because vaccine apartheid is slow genocide, but also because the longer billions of people are infected, the greater the chance that one of them will incubate a vaccine-resistant, even more deadly mutation.

MRNA vaccines are wild: compared to conventional vaccines, they can be manufactured with 99.7% less capital and 99.9% less physical plant, and mRNA production facilities can retool to make new vaccines 1,000% faster.

https://coronavirus.medium.com/manufacturing-mrna-vaccines-is-surprisingly-straightforward-despite-what-bill-gates-thinks-222cffb686ee

Moderna’s own assessment is that new mRNA facilities can be built in 3–4 months. There’s no good scientific or humanitarian reason to object to patent- and know-how transfer to the Global South, where vaccination is currently projected for 2023/4 (!).

https://apnews.com/article/drug-companies-called-share-vaccine-info-22d92afbc3ea9ed519be007f8887bcf6

We’ve just experienced the collapse of the racist lie — peddled by Big Pharma, Bill Gates, Howard Dean and other vaccine apartheid apologists — that poor brown people are too primitive to make vaccines.

The new talking point? “CHINA! CHINA! CHINA!”

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/15/how-to-rob-a-bank/#roll-the-dice

Whether it’s racist lies about the Global South or New Cold War hysteria, the underlying ideological story is the same: exclusive patent rights and the (spectacular) profits they yield are the foundation of lifesaving medical innovation.

That is, fate has placed among us a tiny cohort of collosi, endowed with the superpower of inventing the future. But for all their creative might, these saviors-in-potentia have the fragile temperaments of toddlers, and if they’re denied their due, they’ll abandon us to die.

“Behind every great fortune lies a great crime.” The true mRNA vaccines theft isn’t entrepreneur-inventors who face robbery by the public sector — rather, those “entrepreneurs” have enjoyed billions in public subsidies, and now insist they owe nothing in return.

So much public investment went into the covid vaccines that it’s hard to account for it all. The GAO thinks that Uncle Sam coughed up $18–23b in direct subsidies. BARDA pumped in $19.3b.

https://www.healthaffairs.org/do/10.1377/hblog20210512.191448/full/

The USG picked up the tab for non-clinical studies of new covid vaccines ($900m), and also shelled out for Phase III trials ($2.7b).

Moderna got $53m for production capacity, part of $100m in direct capacity contracts to pharma, backed with $2.7b for contract manufacturers.

J&J got a $1b pre-order from the USG; Moderna got $4.95b, Pfizer (which touts its lack of public subsidy!) got a $5.97b guaranteed order.

That’s just the latest round of investment. BARDA has been backing mRNA vaccine research for years, pumping billions into the project.

Pharma’s claim that it doesn’t owe us anything in return makes no sense, even by the companies’ own logic. They say that markets produce wonders because they reward canny risk-taking with vast fortunes.

By that logic, the public — who assumed the majority of the risk in developing vaccines — are the angel investors in this high-tech unicorn, and the pharma companies are the VCs who came in with some late capital to help scale up a sure thing.

It’s neither good business — nor legal — for early minority investors get squeezed out by latecomers.

But, of course, the government isn’t a business. Our democratic institutions direct our national productive capacity to R&D in service to human thriving, not profit.

Public investment in R&D isn’t a business in the same way that having kids isn’t a retirement plan: we have kids because we love them and want them to thrive. If they care for us in our dotage, that’s great, but if you treat your kid as an ambulatory 401k, you’re a monster.

I first encountered these ideas when serving as an NGO rep at WIPO alongside Jamie Love and Knowledge Ecology International. Love helped create the Access to Medicines Treaty and has been fighting the pharma industry’s self-serving story of fragile genius for decades.

In an interview with Janine Jackson at FAIR, Love lays out the plain case for an IP-waiver to enable poor countries to make their own vaccines, like the undeniable truth that this would “definitely expand the production and supply of vaccines.”

https://fair.org/home/government-money-thats-gone-into-vaccine-development-is-being-privatized-by-a-handful-of-companies/

Love also recounts the kind of public subsidy that went into covid vaccine production (for example, Pfizer’s boasts of free enterprise entrepreneurship omits the €400m from Germany and €100m from the rest of the EU).

Pharma’s claims of philanthropic largesse are wildly overblown. Pfizer told its shareholders it expects $26b from covid vaccines in 2021; Moderna’s projecting $20b (Moderna’s CEO’s personal net worth just hit $5b).

All that before pharma companies jack up the prices for “their” vaccines, in the years to come when we all need annual boosters, when the price will go from $10 to $175/dose, for a vaccine that costs $0.10/dose to manufacture.

The case for public access to vaccines and the case against pharma as a necessary or even laudable force for good is so thin, it’s remarkable that it’s persisted this long.

But as Love points out, the ideology that knowledge-monopolies are moral has some powerful backers.

Bill Gates is a prime example. Gates has been committed to enclosing commonly created knowledge and turning it into a monopoly — in service to coaxing our toddler-genius-collosi into action — since he was a teenager, writing petulant letters to computer hobbyists.

Today, Gates — a convicted monopolist — directs one of the world’s great fortunes (“behind every great fortune…”), and he mobilizes his capital to prop up the story of necessary and benevolent profiteering.

The Gates Foundation, for example, donates millions to “independent” media outlets (as well as partnering with public media like the BBC), and as Love describes, this has a chilling effect on negative reporting on Gates, the Foundation, and its ideology.

Like the time Love got a Washington Monthly reporter interested in a critical story about how the Gates Foundation’s grants influence its media coverage — only to have the reporter’s editor kill the story because they’d just applied for one of those grants (!).

Gates is a true ideologue, a relentless campaigner against any public access to public goods, in every domain, not just software. He’s been at it a long time, leading the charge against Nelson Mandela’s demand that South Africa be allowed to manufacture its own AIDS drugs.

Love: “Gates is a smart guy; he’s not the only smart guy around or smart woman around. I think people need to listen to other views. And, actually, Gates has sort of a mental block about these issues, and so some of his arguments just don’t add up.”

But all laws are local, and multi-agent systems have many stable configurations. On Friday, the New York Times editorial board — long a voice for strong corporate power — published an editorial and accompanying package strongly endorsing vaccine waivers.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/14/opinion/biden-covid-vaccines-world-india.html

The Times notes that the global economy is losing trillions due to lockdown, and that these loses will mount for so long as vaccines aren’t universally available.

But it also makes an ethical case, calling vaccine apartheid a “moral failure.”

It warns of political instability and the potential for states to topple if something isn’t done, pointing to the pitched battles in Colombia (in which death squads are now murdering leftists with impunity and posting snuff videos to social media as a boast — and a warning).

Beyond advocating for vaccine waivers, the Times backs Public Citizen’s plan to spend $25b ramping up domestic, publicly owned vaccine production facilities to make vaccines to be given away free or at cost to poor countries.

https://www.citizen.org/article/25-billion-to-vaccinate-the-world/

That effort will produce 8b vaccine doses, “enough to vaccinate half the planet.” And it will provide booster shots and new anti-variant vaccines into the future.

The future is coming. Lockdowns are lifting. The rich world is inching toward an emergence from emergency. But normalcy isn’t returning — thank goodness. The whole world deserves (and requires) so much better than normal.

Image: Quapan (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/hinkelstone/49920420853

CC BY https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

[monsterqueers]

New Essay Up

New essay up on the website!

props and credit to @shadowfae , whos panel on problematic sources at Othercon 2021 motivated and inspired me to write about morality differences.

Alignments - A Memory Dump Essay

Essay has also been transcribed under this readmore if thats easier to read for anyone.

Morality, in The Before, was different, in the sense that there were Allignments.

I am A Silver Dragon, from a slightly AU-ed Dungeons and Dragons world. Alignments there dictated whether you were good or evil, lawful or chaotic. You may have seen the grid around, the nine squares with things like ‘neutral good’ and ‘lawful evil’ on them. This is that.

When I say ‘good’ and ‘evil’ I mean a different concept than the behavior choices that fall into ‘doing harm’ and ‘helping people’. There were words differing between the two in dragonic, though I do not remember them now, for what I am talking about.

In this world, ‘good’, ‘evil’, ‘lawful’ and ‘chaotic’ - the dragonic forms of these words, were not behavior descriptors, nor intention descriptions. They were factions, and many species simply could not choose their born faction or change it very much if they could. These factions were generally due to god interference in the creation of that species, and it meant certain magics worked or did not work against/for them or they had traits that were often seen as harmful. The correct translation for ‘good’ and ‘evil’ is more accurately ‘darkness’ and ‘light’, though lawful and chaotic are close enough to ‘things that follow order’, and ‘things that reject order’.

These alignments said very little about the behavior they exhibited or the morals they had. The dragonic word for ‘evil’ as in how people here use it to mean ‘does harm to others’ could be retranslated as ‘being an asshole’. A person aligned lawful good could regularly commit tax fraud and beat their wife, and a person who was chaotic evil could be a pacifist who gardens and is passionate about healthcare reform.

For some of the littlefolk (the Polite translated dragonic word for humans and elves and the like), this was more flexible, and generally littlefolk would not consider those who did large amounts of harm to their in-group to be good aligned, nor people who had never done harm any worse than neutral, despite this not being the case magically speaking. It could make things rather confusing when talking to the layman, as much of the littlefolk could simply choose whatever faction they liked and often could jump ship whenever they liked too.

There were other various littlefolk somewhat limited in their alignment choice however- a Drow could not be ‘good’, and Aasimir could not be ‘evil’, for example. Usually this was split down the good and evil, rather than lawful and chaotic, as the ‘good’ and ‘evil’ deities held the most active sway.

Think of it like nationality, I suppose. Its the closest equivalent. Some people can't ever gain citizenship in a country other than their country of birth even if they want to, others can do so with a bit of work.

Dragons, however, didn’t have this sort of choice. All true dragons were born a specific alignment to do with their species, and inherent instincts to follow the tenants generally professed by that faction. This is one of the major traits that separated a True -also known as Greater- Dragon from other dragonic creatures, such as fairy dragons, wyverns, and rust dragons, actually. Other dragonic creatures had some wiggle room.

Chromatic dragons were all evil aligned, Gem dragons were all neutral aligned, and Metallic dragons were all good aligned. Planar dragons, while true dragons, were another matter and their alignments were to nothing on the scale as their origin points and commitments were beyond the gods of that my former plane’s influence. Lung dragons were a type of Planar dragon in my canon, instead of their own category.

The individual species of those groupings each had a assigned further spot. A Gold Dragon was ALWAYS Lawful Good, whether they are an abhorrent entity or not, and a White Dragon was always Chaotic Evil.

The individual species were as follows(* for ones that are AU to dnd 5e canon but are true to mine):

Chaotic Evil - Red, Black, Yellow, White

Neutral Evil - Brown, Purple*, Gray

Lawful Evil - Blue, Green

Chaotic Neutral - Topaz, Crystal

True Neutral - Amber, Amethyst, Obsidian*, Prismatic

Lawful Neutral - Emerald, Sapphire

Chaotic Good - Copper, Mercury*, Brass

Neutral Good - Silver*, Iron*

Lawful Good - Gold, Bronze, Platinum*, Steel

So I was and am a Silver Dragon. Bahumat created metallic dragons with the intention of combating His sister Tiamat, who created chromatic dragons in turn. The deities of Law and Chaos- neither touched my kind deeply. We could use all magic aligned with the light or neutral powers, and none of the dark. There was little magic that was specifically aligned with order and chaos, but all of that was accessible, provided the spell was not of the shadow. Things that repelled creatures of the light could keep me out.

The more ‘good’ creatures that existed in the world in relation to ‘evil’ ones brought more and less power to Bahumat and Tiamat in their eternal fight. So long as one ‘good’ or ‘evil’ creature existed, neither god could die and they were driven to wipe each other out. The same could be said of the law and chaos deities.

Of my life, the beginning is murky. Once I was grown enough to roam, I first Adventured with a elven rider companion and then lived upon a mountain lair until my death. Towards the middle and latter end, the towns at its base paid me rites and respect for my guardianship. These rites did technically elevate me to a minor god* capable of working greater magic. I also had a village much closer to and in my lair, one where I took those who asked my asylum who perhaps needed greater safety or guidance.

I would defend my territory and would help those who asked. It was a good life, and I hold little to no exotrauma from it.

*not to be confused with Greater gods, which are what effect Alignment or embody big concepts, minor gods are just those who are Believed in by enough people- and thus given power from that collective Belief

The divide between what was and what is is deeper and more shallow that one would expect, all at once.

I’ve started tentatively identifying as a walk-in relatively recently, my selfhood simply showed up one day and the original, whos interests, opinions, demeanor, and identity was different than mine disappeared shortly thereafter. The system has many theories on how exactly this happened, the origins thus such, and how much of the original’s ego was made into me, and also exactly when. The transition was rather seamless and there was much brain weirdness to muddle it all and convince me that I have always been here. None of us know the answer, and it generally doesn’t matter in practice.

The experiences of the original that I inherited gave a large amount of distance to this life. For reference, I Awakened as a Silver Dragon ~2014 perhaps 2015 -time is muddy- or so- having finally put together all the noema and shifts and assorted feelings that were not my cat theriotype into what they were. I had been in the body for a good handful of years previous to that, however. It gives me a distance from that life. My memories and retained selfhood from that life are dull- a botched reincarnation. I remember just enough- I experience just enough bleedover that it upholds a pillar of my identity and I still identify as the being of that life, but not so much I am exactly as-is.

I want to do a little disclaimer- The statement that this definitively IS a past life and I AM a walk in and these ARE memories of a past life is a theory, not fact. I do not and cannot know if my theory is right, and I have a healthy dose of skepticism in regards to this. My experiences could be sourced to many things, however I experience my draconity in a fashion that is similar to how others describe their past life experiences. It fits accounts better than the accounts of people who are not past-life otherkin. It feels right to describe these experiences as such, and so I do. Perhaps one day my understanding of this may change, but for now it is as such.

Returning to the topic at hand; its a point of frustration to me almost to the point of dysphoria, how good and evil, and moral and immoral are used in society here and how. Good and evil denote both the ingroup-outgroup AND the moral standard, equating sinful with strange with harmful behavior. Evil no longer means ‘entity supporting or created by Tiamat’- who is night and shadow. Good no longer means ‘entity supporting or created by Bahumat’- who is day and light.

The congruence of good with helping and evil with harming is far more intense here, Bahumat and Tiamat as I know them hold no power here- as they shouldn’t. Their place was in my old reality and that is as far as those entities reach. The assignment of moral values to enjoyment of a thing or thoughts, rather than actions is wholly new, and honestly quite unpleasant.

Evil here, becomes ‘entity that enjoys harming’ and often ‘anyone I don’t like’

Good here them also becomes ‘entity that enjoys helping’ and often ‘anyone I do like’

There will be people who insist to ignore people that do that last part and claim that it doesn’t matter- that the social realities of how others assign you do not matter, but I disagree.

Being queer, kinky, mentally ill, neurodivergent, disabled, and a strong leftist among other things means people will think me evil for existing quite a bit. Stigmatized minorities are othered, our traits become evil no matter how kind we may be.

Society calls us evil, has designated us evil- alright, how is this a bad thing?

Disassociating Evil from moral allows one to reclaim Evil. Ok, we are Evil now, but oh, no less kind. No less caring. Take the words slung at you and make armor out of them.

And also no matter how kind you may be, by this metric if you enjoy causing pain and destruction, you are evil.

This… is a thoughtcrime thing. No matter how you conduct yourself in life, if you enjoy pain you are evil to society at large. So as above, unlink Evil from Moral, and it is reclaimable.

How people assign you is a material reality you can choose to make hold no power over you. You can make it your own scales.

It is for the reason of words changing meanings, of the fact that my god I was born to does not reach here and thus frees me from obligations, that I no longer identify as Neutral Good. It simply does not mean the same thing anymore and I can now choose my alignment besides. Bahumat was no terrible god to serve or anything, but I would have appreciated the choice if it was not hardwired into my dragon brain at the time to be devoted to such a being.

I take joy in harm and at the same time take joy in helping, I think the absence of care of society is not something I can do, nor do I think rigid obedience is right.

Thus I would consider myself in the alignments of this world today as True Neutral.

Not to mention I have chosen the service of a True Neutral god in Cernunnos, so by my former world’s standards I am True Neutral now as well.

It feels right, to identify as such now. Society considers me evil enough I am too sin-stained to be good, but I have too much love of creation and helping to be wholly evil.

I believe that rules are necessary or we get Situations that cause harm to others, but at the same time am too Anarchist-leaning to not chafe under absolute order.

Still, the... Dissatisfaction with how people use alignments here persists.

[soulvomit]

For a lot of middle class reared people, ageing is an “out of sight, out of mind” problem that they put off thinking about for as long as possible; they don’t really have to deal with their parents’ ageing in ways that people from relatively poorer families have to. This is one of those “material realities faced by most of us” issues that constitutes one of my biggest disconnects with so many white middle class leftists. Most middle class, urban white Americans have been raised to think that their parents’ ageing is something they’ll just get to wash their hands of. They think dealing with it is an OPTION and something that’s the earned reward of their parents having loved them enough, and that nobody will frown on them, and or the consequences of that disapproval will be minimal. (And this may change because of social media and cancel culture, but the world most of us grew up in is still one where middle class-reared white urban people don’t think they have to think about these things.) Gen X middle class urban Americans “went to visit Grandma.” Grandma did not live with us. And when Grandma finally died, she did it in a care facility or hospital, distanced from us. And lots of Silent Generation middle class and even working class people had pensions.  So lots of people imagine that our parents’ ageing is something we can just put off thinking about, because our own parents possibly didn’t even have to think about it.   There is a broad feeling that “I don’t owe my parents anything.” This isn’t even from people who actually hate their parents. It’s a relatively normified WASP, middle class sentiment.  But what’s actually happening *on the ground* is that in my own age group - Gen X - quietly, one by one, elderly parents are moving back home, and in with their middle aged offspring. Quietly, one by one, Gen X people have had to even move in with their parents to do direct care. The number of working Gen X people I know who live under the same roof with an elderly parent, is incredible.  The support structures that would enable any other kind of option, have completely fallen away for a lot of us... and what younger people say? “I don’t owe my parents anything?” Yeah, the thing is, lots of us said that, once.  The reality is that even if you don’t technically owe your parents anything, unless you actually hate them, you’ll probably take them in, too. Or go to live with them. (Which is a common situation. We need to talk about how McMansions are actually becoming multigenerational compounds.)

And it’s not necessarily about providing direct care given how many of the seniors in question are comparatively able-bodied. Sometimes it’s about household economy. Often times a family member with their social security check, becomes  preferable to a roommate or boarder: “the devil you know.” Sometimes, too, the spry ageing parent is who we turn to for child care.  For the past 25 or more years, the shape of the white middle class family has been changing to match the household shape of practically every other group of people. Eventually, multigenerationalism could be a broad norm.  And because of the taboo against talking about actual material realities that seems to exist among so many white middle class people?  Feh. Nobody will talk about it. Then there’s the thing with our parents that we may have if the family is of a marginalized group.  In my own family, my “owing something to my mother” is... well.. I get something out of this relationship, too? She is my only living connection to Jewish culture, where I live. It means that I put up with a lot of things in our relationship that other people feel like they don’t have to put up with. And I have an actual cultural obligation to carry on the work my dad is doing for his tribe.  Would I just let my parents fend for themselves? No. I can’t even imagine doing such a thing. I could imagine it at 20, because the idea of my parents eventually being seniors *wasn’t real to me yet.* I didn’t know that I would have to eventually go to my mom’s doctors’ appointments with her because doctors had stopped taking her complaints seriously.  And this is leaving aside the family obligations we inherit when we get married/have a partner.  Sometimes we do things because SOMEBODY HAS TO DO THEM, and YOU ARE THE ONLY PERSON WHO CAN DO THEM. And if your parents were abusive or neglectful, you end up having to weigh whether it was bad enough to warrant leaving them to twist in the wind, and possibly die. My mother was not always a good mother, but I still love her. She would have had to have been a lot worse for me to not look after her.  And seriously, society exists outside of ourselves and our feelings. If we are prosocial people, and our parents didn’t actually abuse us, then we WILL do those things because otherwise we’d broadly be known as assholes, and we don’t want to be seen that way. I wonder how much it’s an urban individualism thing, because... if you’re in a small town or you’re in a tight knit cultural community (with no support from the outside) then do you really want to be known as the Village Asshole? (I’m not guilt tripping you! I’m saying that you WILL make these decisions. Eventually. You are just not there yet.) We really underestimate how much social pressure eventually will catch up with us. Like, if I became the Village Asshole, I’d not only be leaving my mom to twist in the wind, but everyone at Chabad would know I was the Village Asshole and I’d lose the meager thread of support as a Jew that I have in this community. 

This is a thing where I feel like it’s easier for *actually* antisocial, uncaring people to socially climb, because less structural access equals more obligations that get shouldered, and (especially if you’re a woman) your parents’ and family members’ lack of social safety net, eventually catches up with you. I feel like people who have a lot more access and options, whose families have always had a lot more access and options, tend to imagine that those options will always exist for them. People also tend to think they’ll always have the perks and bennies they have now, unless they’ve already experienced losing those perks and bennies, or there have been a *lot* of examples in their lived reality of people *not* having those perks and bennies. The people who won’t consider ageing in their own ideology, likely don’t know anyone in their neighborhood who has grandparents under the same roof, or takes on those kind of family obligations. If you’re a white urban person then chances are, you might have even been raised around people who *did* have multigenerational family obligations or households, but if they weren’t white, chances are... you didn’t notice, you wrote it off as “that’s their culture,” and didn’t consider *why* multigenerationalism was the most economically sustainable family shape.   Most of my generation didn’t imagine we’d have to eventually make up for the social safety net that has fallen out from underneath our parents.  It’ll happen to Zoomers, too.

And a big reason I feel like progressive social causes *are* a big emergency, is because of the cultural crisis we will have when multigenerationalism becomes a standard American norm, across the board, most  people raising families will be doing it in multigenerational families. I don’t think multigenerationalism is *bad* inherently... but I’m worried that it could end up with a lot of personal liberties and civil rights getting walked back.  We need to fix this problem NOW and we need to fix our family relationships NOW because otherwise, the norming of multigenerational households, could actually have a negative effect upon gains for women and, in general, LGBTQ people. Imagine NEVER being able to get away from your abusive, homophobic/transphobic parents. Imagine that the image of Woman As Caregiver is an even *more* broadly entrenched social institution, especially as jobs become more scarce.

We need to fix these problems NOW, and we can’t unless we actually FACE them.

[96thdayofrage]

No, Biden, This Is About Freedom and Personal Choice

  No, Biden, This Is About Freedom and Personal Choice – Reason.com                

It's time to stop "states of exception" that justify government overreach into more and more of our lives.                                                                                         

There is every reason to believe that President Joe Biden's vaccine mandate for COVID-19 will not survive legal scrutiny even as compulsory vaccination for the disease enjoys broad popularity among the public. As former Rep. Justin Amash (L–Mich.)—like me, a pro-vaccine, anti-mandate libertarian—has bluntly noted, "There is no authority for this. This is a legislative action that bypasses the legislative branch."

The courts will almost certainly strike down this executive branch overreach and the sweeping new rules that wave away longstanding distinctions between public and private spheres of activity. This is what happened to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's eviction moratorium. It's foundational to American life that the president is not a king who can subject citizens to his whims.

Yet the most important passage in Biden's remarks reveals a governing philosophy that should give all Americans pause, especially in light of the massive and ongoing expansion of the federal government over the past several decades. After duly noting the "progress" made in terms of vaccinations, Biden pulled up short to say that we the people are just not doing what he wants when he wants:

This is not about freedom or personal choice. It's about protecting yourself and those around you — the people you work with, the people you care about, the people you love.

My job as president is to protect all Americans. So tonight, I'm announcing that the Department of Labor is developing an emergency rule to require all employers with 100 or more employees that together employ over 80 million workers to ensure their work forces are fully vaccinated or show a negative test at least once a week.

As Jeffrey A. Singer, a surgeon and senior fellow for the Cato Institute, has noted, COVID-19 has a "0.2 percent fatality rate among people not living in institutions." Fully 80 percent of deaths have occurred among people over 65 and just 358 children under the age of 17 had died of the disease as of July 29, 2021. We are not talking about smallpox, which affected all populations and had a fatality rate of 30 percent. COVID, argues Singer, "will not be eradicated" and will become a small-scale, endemic problem that should be minimized by targeted interventions to protect the most vulnerable. From a public health perspective, it should not become the casus belli for a radical restructuring of society and a massive expansion of presidential (or governmental) powers.

Vaccines are not only effective against getting COVID-19 in the first place, they virtually guarantee you will not die or even be hospitalized if you do contract it. Let Washington state's King County—where the first cases of COVID presented back in early 2020—stand in for the nation as a whole. Unvaccinated people there are seven times more likely to catch COVID, 50 times more likely to be hospitalized, and 30 times as likely to die. Age-adjusted death rates show the benefits of vaccination in unmistakable terms (see chart above).

The rapid development and deployment of safe and effective vaccines—a medical miracle that could have gone months faster had the Food and Drug Administration not acted as ploddingly as a wizened old draft horse—makes possible the return to normalcy that was promised in the early days of the pandemic. We are now capable of setting and enforcing our own risk limits on what sorts of activities we want to do. The information is out there and individuals, employers, and establishments can set and are setting their own rules based on what they want. If we don't all agree, that's not chaos, that's freedom in all its unregimented, varied glory. It allows comedian Patton Oswalt to cancel shows in places that won't follow his protocols while letting other performances to take place under less-stringent conditions.

As important, the "vaccine-hesitant" are hesitant for all sorts of reasons. Poorer people tend to be less vaccinated than average, and so are blacks and Hispanics and younger people, and, weirdly, people with doctorates. A flat, imperious mandate that doesn't speak to these groups' differing concerns will only sharpen political and cultural divides even as Biden claims to be acting in the name of national unity. This is already happening, as individuals and groups are becoming less nuanced in their responses and simply signing up for whatever political tribe they feel bound to. Hence, a sizeable chunk of conservative Republicans are not simply anti-vaccine mandate but anti-vaccine, and the ACLU, which only a few years ago denounced most vaccine mandates, has now fully embraced them. While done in the name of protecting "all Americans," Biden's mandate clearly escalates ongoing culture wars.

So even as he ends the war in Afghanistan, Biden beefs up the war on COVID. It's understandable, wanting to be a wartime president, whether the threats to the country are truly existential or mostly invented and overstated (as they certainly were in the war on terror). Being at war ushers in what the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls a "state of exception," which allows the leaders of nominally limited governments to suspend restrictions on their power.

Heavily influenced by Michel Foucault, who like the public-choice economists argued that power is routinely expanded using medicalized "helper rhetoric," Agamben was a leading critic of the global war on terror when Western powers, including and especially the United States, vastly expanded surveillance, police, and military actions in the wake of the 9/11 attacks—always in the name of defending a free society (go here for a video lecture I gave at Bard College on this). When his Italian government started one of the first and most draconian lockdowns related to COVID-19, he sounded the alarm again even as many of his leftist allies called him crazy. Yet over the past several decades, governments at all levels in the United States and elsewhere have squandered whatever trust and confidence we once accorded them. When it comes to the Covid-19 response, our official agencies can no longer claim the benefit of the doubt due to an ongoing series of "arbitrary, dubious, and ever-changing recommendations."

Yet rather than use persuasion and dialogue to get his way, Biden is invoking a state of exception as the pretext for issuing a massive expansion of his power over more and more aspects of our daily lives (Donald Trump, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, and other past presidents all did something similar, of course). We must push back not simply because of what his new order would actually do but because of the expansion of political power it continues and expands.

We want to live in a country and a world in which "freedom or personal choice" is growing, not constantly being swept aside as an obstacle to a leader's plan.

[newstfionline]

Headlines

SpaceX capsule and NASA crew make 1st splashdown in 45 years (AP) Two NASA astronauts returned to Earth on Sunday in a dramatic, retro-style splashdown, their capsule parachuting into the Gulf of Mexico to close out an unprecedented test flight by Elon Musk’s SpaceX company. It was the first splashdown by U.S. astronauts in 45 years, with the first commercially built and operated spacecraft to carry people to and from orbit. The return clears the way for another SpaceX crew launch as early as next month and possible tourist flights next year. Test pilots Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken rode the SpaceX Dragon capsule back to Earth less than a day after departing the International Space Station and two months after blasting off from Florida. The capsule parachuted into the calm gulf waters about 40 miles off the coast of Pensacola, hundreds of miles from Tropical Storm Isaias pounding Florida’s Atlantic coast. “Welcome back to planet Earth and thanks for flying SpaceX,” said Mission Control from SpaceX headquarters. More than an hour after splashdown, the astronauts emerged from their capsule on the deck of a recovery ship, both signaling a thumbs-up as they headed for medical exams.

Students return to campus (AP) The first wave of college students returning to their dorms aren’t finding the typical mobs of students and parents. What they found Friday were strict safety protocols and some heightened anxiety amid a global pandemic where virus infections are growing in dozens of states. North Carolina State University staggered the return of its students over 10 days and welcomed the first 900 students to campus, where they were greeted Friday by socially distant volunteers donning masks and face shields. Elon University in North Carolina, mailed testing kits to all 7,000 students ahead of their arrival in a few weeks. Maine’s Colby College will be testing students before they arrive and then three times a week for the first two weeks on campus. They’ll be tested twice a week after that, until the semester ends. The University of Rhode Island is scaling back campus housing to abide by distancing requirements, causing a scramble for some students. “Just like the rest of the world, we have to figure out how to carry on,” said Betsy Flanagan, who was sending her freshman son, Arch, off to college. “This virus isn’t going away and it’s going to be with us for quite a while, so we all have to figure out how to safely exist and that includes continuing to educate our future.”

Face masks are thwarting even the best facial recognition algorithms, study finds (CNET) It turns out face masks aren’t just effective at preventing the spread of airborne diseases like COVID-19—they’re also successful at blocking facial recognition algorithms, researchers say. In a report published Monday, the US National Institute of Standards and Technology found that face masks were thwarting even the most advanced facial recognition algorithms. Error rates varied from 5% to 50%, depending on an algorithm’s capabilities.

How the pandemic and a broken unemployment system are upending people’s lives (Washington Post) He had five days to move out of the house in Brightwood Park, and now Daniel Vought stood looking at the plastic crates stacked in the living room holding his things. T-shirts. Power cords. Pokémon cards and stuffed animals. His beloved guitar—a Gibson Explorer electric—still hung on the wall. He figured it would be safer staying behind. A new housemate was coming, one who could actually pay $800 a month for the room Vought, 30, had lived in rent-free since the coronavirus pandemic shut down the Georgetown bar where he worked. For four months, his unemployment benefits application had been snared in red tape at the D.C. Department of Employment Services, a black hole of unanswered emails, phone holds and automated voice messages offering delays instead of answers. Hundreds, if not thousands, of people in the nation’s capital have been sucked down the same confusing abyss. Through July 29, the employment office has fielded more than 133,000 claims, nearly five times the number processed in all of 2019. In the meantime, the end of July meant the end of the initial round of federal emergency pandemic assistance. Republicans and Democrats in Congress are deadlocked over the scope of a second wave of federal help. No matter what that future assistance looks like, for people like Vought, still waiting for benefits from the spring and living without a financial cushion, the damage has been done. People pushed into poverty by the coronavirus pandemic could face years of increased dependence on government help, experts say, and greater housing insecurity and homelessness. A single mother with another baby due this summer found herself choosing between buying food or paying the rent. A former D.C. police officer spent months on a relative’s sofa, unable to find work or collect unemployment so he could find his own housing.

Coronavirus pandemic causes another health concern—closed public restrooms (Washington Post) When courier Brent Williams makes his daily deliveries around the city here, he runs into one persistent problem: There’s almost nowhere to use the restroom. Most public buildings are closed under the pandemic, and restaurants and coffee shops that have shifted to carryout service won’t let him use their facilities. “It’s hard to find any place where I can use the restroom,” said Williams, speaking outside a ­library in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood that has reopened its ­restrooms to the public. The library is one of five citywide to have opened their doors, and other parts of the city have almost no options for those who need to relieve themselves or wash their hands. The lack of restrooms has become an issue for delivery workers, taxi and ride-hailing drivers and others who make their living outside of a fixed office building. For the city’s homeless, it’s part of an ongoing problem that preceded covid-19. “It’s gone from bad to worse,” said Eric, who lives in an encampment near Interstate 5. (Eric asked to be identified by only his first name.) “It’s definitely much, much harder.”

A weakened Tropical Storm Isaias lashes virus-hit Florida (AP) Bands of heavy rain from Isaias lashed Florida’s east coast Sunday while officials dealing with surging cases of the coronavirus kept a close watch on the weakened tropical storm. Isaias was downgraded from a hurricane to a tropical storm Saturday afternoon, but was still threatening to bring heavy rain and flooding as it crawled just off Florida’s Atlantic coast. Upper-level winds took much of the strength out of Isaias, said Stacy Stewart, senior hurricane specialist at the National Hurricane Center in Miami. The storm also slowed down considerably.Authorities closed beaches, parks and virus testing sites, lashing signs to palm trees so they wouldn’t blow away. DeSantis said the state is anticipating power outages and asked residents to have a week’s supply of water, food and medicine on hand. Officials wrestled with how to prepare shelters where people can seek refuge from the storm if necessary, while also safely social distancing to prevent the spread of the virus.

Latin America coronavirus death toll surges past 200,000 (Reuters) The death toll in Latin America from the novel coronavirus passed 200,000 on Saturday night, a Reuters tally showed, underlining the region’s status as one of the global epicenters of the pandemic that is testing governments to the limit. Apart from the United States, Brazil and Mexico have racked up more fatalities from the virus than any other country, and together they account for around 70% of the regional death toll. Both have struggled to balance the need to curb the spread of the virus with restrictive safety measures while trying to reopen their economies, which have been battered by the crisis. Other countries in Latin America are also battling to hold the coronavirus at bay, and the region breached the 200,000 mark after Peru registered another 191 fatalities.

Indian police crackdown on illegal liquor suppliers after 86 die (Reuters) Indian police raided rural hamlets and made arrests to break up a bootlegging cartel on Sunday, after 86 people died from consuming illegally-produced alcohol this week in the northwestern state of Punjab, officials said.

Victoria state declares disaster, night curfew (AP) The premier of Australia’s hard-hit Victoria state has declared a disaster among sweeping new coronavirus restrictions across Melbourne and elsewhere from Sunday night. An evening curfew will be implemented across Melbourne from 8 p.m. to 5 a.m. Premier Daniel Andrews says the state of disaster proclamation gave police greater power. He says 671 new coronavirus cases had been detected since Saturday, including seven deaths. It comes among a steadily increasing toll in both deaths and infections over the past six weeks in Victoria. Melbourne residents will only be allowed to shop and exercise within 5 kilometers (3 miles) of their homes. All students across the state will return to home-based learning and child care centers will be closed.

Israel’s Netanyahu rails at media over protests against him (AP) Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday railed at swelling protests against his rule, saying they were egged on by a biased media that distorts facts and cheers on the demonstrators. Netanyahu has faced a wave of protests in recent weeks, with demonstrators calling for the resignation of the long-serving leader, who is on trial for corruption charges. They’ve also panned his handling of the coronavirus crisis. Netanyahu has painted the protests as dens of “anarchists” and “leftists” out to topple “a strong right-wing leader.” The protests have largely been peaceful. In some cases they have ended with clashes between demonstrators and police. In others, small gangs of Netanyahu supporters and individuals affiliated with far-right groups have assaulted demonstrators.

[megrimlocke]

How We Are All Going to Die Laughing

The other day, I was looking at a post made by one of my favorite internet comic artists.  The guy used to be something I’d read in the army newspapers, next to the adds for cheap TVs at the post exchange, but these days it’s mostly a facebook feed I occasionally read.  The artist and writer behind “PVT Murphy” (though these days Murphy’s a sergeant, I’m aging after all it seems) was annoyed at Facebook showing him a shopping page offering what amounted to white nationalist (US neonazi, if you prefer) paraphernalia.

Now, I pointed out that this was what the robot had concluded he wanted to see, and honestly none of us should be surprised by this.  Military members lean right, and in the age of Trump this means that radicalization is around every corner- though for the record it always has been.  In some insidious ways with a cancer of racists and bigots among our ranks, sure, I know because being gay I was targeted by a few myself, but also in more subtle ways.

I once watched a man scream at some Iraqis who were emptying a waste bin nearby, screaming that they didn’t get him, because he’d been the target of an IED attack two hours prior.  Those men had no way in hell of having anything to do with it, but the guy that hit us got away free and the trash guys looked like someone he could defiantly vent his feelings of helplessness and victimhood upon in a vain effort to reclaim his power.  I’m not condoning it, I’m just saying that sometimes the path to prejudice isn’t paved with propaganda and privilege.

I have every faith in the artist who draws PVT Murphy himself, but if you attract the attention of a lot of white supremacists, then probably the robot is going to conclude that you might want to look at some of the things that all the people who like your posts are looking at.  Hence the shop page that offered a wall pinup of a templar knight preparing to smite the saracen to defend (white) Christendom with a few crass remarks about Islam written on it.

Now I explained, in truncated terms, how the robot made this call.  The artist wasn’t excited about this explanation, and in fairness no one is excited about the black mirror showing them something ugly, it’s almost like an automated attack.  But the machine was really just trying to be helpful.  It wasn’t programmed to be sensitive to racial issues, and certainly the people who took out the add didn’t take that into their considerations.  It identified a pattern and arranged the delivery of data that conformed with its instructions based upon the data input.

Now, some right wing dude decided to join in this discussion to point out that the robot didn’t know what it was talking about, included the terms “lib” and “snowflake” in his post, and suggested that if the robot had any idea who he was it wouldn’t keep showing him liberal content- after all he always used the laugh react on it.  I pointed out this part as well, but I’d like to go into a deeper analysis for this discourse.

The right, and perhaps a lot of people using the reacts on facebook, has decided that you can use the laugh react to express a dismissive chuckle to the words of others.  I think this has several sweeping, problematic implications.

First, the people using the internet are using it to each other, and are either unaware of the robots they share the internet with or ignorant regarding how they function.  The robots do not interpret Laugh as a dismissive gesture.  The data they gather from this is that you were paying attention to something and decided to put a reaction on it.  The Laugh react is not a downvote on reddit, the robot, innocent little helperbot it was made to be, assumes you are amused by the thing you clicked on, and so endeavors to further tickle your funny bone.  In short, it’s your good-natured wholesome friend who doesn’t understand the difference between you laughing with liberals and laughing at us.  It thinks we’re all friends.

This leads to the second problem.  If you are a conservative and you do not care to be bothered with leftist posts, then using the laugh react doesn’t help you at all.  It further engages you with the content that annoys you.  The stuff that caused you to try and put on your dismissive “ha ha tawdry communist drivel” mid-atlantic aristocrat voice is going to keep appearing.  If you’re the sort given to conspiracy theories (and you are my bro, you still hate Hillary for the pizza thing), you might draw the conclusion that you are being targeted by leftist internet operatives, spamming your feed with leftist propaganda.

The truth is you’re spamming yourself with leftist content because your socially clueless helpful robot pal is gonna go out and find more things for you to laugh at.  You’re not special or important enough for leftist internet operatives to target your facebook feed with propaganda attacks, and you have damned yourself to an experience on facebook in which you are bombarded with annoying or even blood-boiling content.  All of this guidance, by the way, is equally applicable to left leaning users of the laugh react as a dismissive gesture.

What this does is contribute to people’s paranoia.  It makes them believe that an enemy that doesn’t exist is trying to get into their heads.  It fills their electronic lives with incendiary content that makes them angry and it encourages them further to continue to have generally unproductive electric arguments with people that they disagree with, leaving them exhausted by a brain full of cortisol.

Personally, I think the Left’s electric sin is more to do with our frankly superior witticisms (sorry Right, you invented and stuck to Nobama, you’re just not witty) and the craving so many of us seem to have for delivering that sick burn one-liner so cutting and succinct that it stops the conservative dead in his rhetorical tracks seems to consume online political discourse on the left almost as aggressively as call-out culture does when arguing among our own.

In the effort to sell us more things by pandering to our professed passions, the capitalist internet has created an electric rage engine that wraps you into one heated argument after another among people who are not listening to one another and who are learning to disengage from hard discussions.  This last part is so dangerous to our democracy.

To be clear, I’m not lamenting the death of compromise specifically.  There can be no compromise on the income gap, healthcre, free elections, or the rights of people who are darker in skin than I.  But the electric rage engine makes it difficult to even have conversations about these things in the real world, and if you’re not talking to the people you disagree with face to face in the here and now, your chances of finding compromise are precisely zero percent, nevermind actually changing their views.

Have you noticed yourself having conversations with people that could just be copy pasted almost word for word off the tumblr where they “informed” themselves about this topic?  I’ll bet that you have.  Or else, more dangerously, you have begun to avoid having such conversations at all with people.  Have you ever been in a discussion turned friendly debate with your friend and realized after a few moments that the debate isn’t suddenly so friendly?  I’m willing to bet it’s been a while, so much so that you might even be shocked if it happens.

People like to go on about how fraught the holidays can be because of how politically charged family dinners can be, but I can’t remember such an experience within the past ten years.  No throw down arguments, no discussions about the merits of one tax policy or another- we can’t even seem to discuss weighty matters with people who are blood kin anymore unless we already know they agree with our own views- and thanks to the electric rage engine, we can know, in precis, what their views are and what we think about them as a result long before we ever think about what to put in our covered dish.  The opportunity for someone stepping into a landmine social or foreign policy issue at family and social gatherings has been eliminated, and with it the ability of the dinner table to serve as a place for families to reach consensus by resolving their arguments.  We don’t talk politics with people who disagree with us in the real world anymore, we all just avoid it and spit our venom on the internet, achieving nothing but our mounting unhappiness and dislike for one another.

I have a young colleague at work, maybe 25, who demonstrated the ability to just promptly end a discussion last week.  Now it was a nonsense discussion and in fairness the participants had gotten into trolling him for kicks, saying a blue shirt was green on purpose or some other nonsense, I don’t remember the particulars.  But what I do remember vividly was the ease and efficiency with which he was able to simply end the discussion, how disengagement came so very naturally to him.  I despise the phrase “agree to disagree” because it means that the argument hasn’t been resolved, but it is at least a sign that there was actual thought going on between participants.  No such gesture here.  My colleague put down the conversation and simply went back to his work with all the ease with which you might put down your phone when you decided you were done arguing with someone, and the ability to do this in realspace chilled me to the bone.

Moreover, there is a certain epistemological nihilism that has arisen among us, suggesting that no one can truly know anything because the sources of information, with whatever omissions or biases they may possess, are a matter of consumerist choice rather than objective fact.  We can’t agree on what is real anymore because if you dislike someone’s account of events, you can simply get someone else to present a more palatable story and declare the other people liars.

If you don’t like what you read on NBC, you can simply tune to Fox to hear it told in a way that you choose to consume, often playing to your appetite for validation rather than your need for actionable information.  We like feeling right, and the consumerist information economy has identified that as a means to get our attention long enough to upload some ads along with our news video of choice.

If the very identity of a person can be expressed by a computer algorithm and 4 or 5 hundred clicks across news articles, think pieces, and shopping pages, how easy will it be for the people who do understand how the machines work to begin influencing who we are?

In closing, I think every single one of us is developing a progressively more toxic relationship with the internet, particularly when it comes to political discourse, and I think that if we aren’t especially careful our ability to simply shut down and switch off, while healthy on the web, is going to begin invading our lives in the waking world in insidious ways that will hurt our ability to function as a cohesive society. I think that the marketing robots and the very act of making a profile and posting to it things that are important to you are dangerous influences on our sense of identity, and that by wrapping our sense of identity in the ideas and products that we consume in such a contrived, calculated fashion that we are restricting our ability to be flexible in our thinking, making us less able to get along with one another.  

I’ve been on a soft departure from Facebook for a good while now, making it my loose rule to stick to messenger and instagram because I like indulging my vanity but for the most part I want to be interacting with people directly and not selling myself for likes when I use these things.  Real attention from real people  is much much better.  

In 2020, I invite you to join me in kicking facebook or your own social media vice altogether and bringing our political lives and our debates back into the real world so that we can practice and re-acquire the skills of persuasion and discussion; not as a cynic call to begin trying to convert every conservative we can find, but for the sake of a political discourse that serves as less of a battleground with immovable ideological fortresses and more of a crucible in which the useless can be burned away and useful consensus and meaningful, mind changing-discussions can be had once again.  We cannot afford to keep unsubscribing from one another if our democracy is to survive. (<- leftist witticism addiction in demonstration)

[googly-eyed-android]

The previous post reminded me of a friend of mine — the one who I've been struggling to cut off — who, well, five or so years ago we were quite close and we would have a lot of discussions about our shared values, and despite not knowing much about politics we both had very progressive values, but then circumstances changed and we started spending less and less time together, and I started becoming more and more dependent on the internet to occupy myself and subsequently became radicalized as a leftist, while she stayed among the influences of ultra orthodox Judaism as it took a very large step to the political right, and I became increasingly aware over the years that we might as well live in different universes as far as politics go, while she seems to be completely oblivious. And some time ago she gave me quite a shock when she texted me and asked if I had ever heard of Jordan Peterson because she was reading a book of his or something. And now we're kind of in a situation where we're dragging around a dead weight in the form of this friend, and we can't tell her that we've drifted apart not only because we're terrible at confrontation, but also because if she gets even a wiff of why we've drifted apart and I don't manage to somehow immediately convince her that I'm right then she'll feel a moral obligation to either save me from myself, protect others from me, or both, which will probably lead to her telling other people, and I really, really don't want to know what the result of that would be. Our living situation is kinda precarious right now, in the sense that we are completely dependent on our parents to live and would die without them and therefore we can't risk doing anything to upset them enough to make them decide that they're done taking care of us, all while desperately hoping that they won't get tired of us over time, and all of that while we try to transition the system into a state where we can be independent without upsetting this delicate balance before the transition is completed (and many of the things that we need to do to make this transition happen are exactly the type of things that could easily upset this delicate balance), and meanwhile our ability to do things is rapidly slipping away, so yeah, we can't afford to go around making waves by cutting off this friend whose very presence is painful to us. And we can't cut her off with no explanation because she knows that we tend to self-isolate and will just take that as a sign that we need her help. So we're just going to have to drag around this dead weight unless until we reach a point where we can safely upset the above-mentioned delicate balance.

Oh, why does our life suck?