#this idea is included in my ideal anarchist future

[mostlyghostly42]

there needs to be libraries for video games

like how libraries have computers for anyone to come in and use for free, you should be able to go in and play any game you can find on the shelves on a video game console available in the library for free

the consoles should also be powered by solar power n stuff as well

[qwilanikan]

Some thoughts on my current relationship politics

I am a relationship anarchist! Sometimes people mean different things when they say this, so I’m going to explain a bit about what it means to me, share some details about my relationship politics in general, and share some links to articles and resources!

"Relationship Anarchy is the idea that love does not need a specific set of rules, but rather that all of our relationships can be construed as valuable, that all can be constructed and shaped by people who want to engage in them, based on free will, and a radical wish to avoid defining relationships by attempts to exercise power over each other." - from The Road to Relationship Anarchy

I don’t date people or distinguish between my friends (in terms of labels or how I prioritize them) based on what I do with them (including whether I have sex with them).  This doesn’t mean I don’t have friends that I prioritize more at various times. What it means is that there isn’t an implicit hierarchy.  I think people use dating or partner language as a way to tell people who has the most priority in their life.

I am antimonigomist (I think that the institution of monogamism is hurtful to everyone.)  Checkout this article to learn more about this. I absolutely love this article and I think that it’s pretty approachable.

I believe that physical and emotional intimacy are abundant resources and that artificial scarcity is created by folks hoarding these resources by only sharing them in certain relationships.  This is not to say that people are obligated to share intimacy with anyone, but that I don’t like creating rules around who people are allowed to share it with.

“if two people only desired to have sexual relations with each other then there would not need to be rules made to govern this.” 

And 

“monogamy is a contract precisely because we do not expect literal monogamy, because we expect our lover to desire sex with others who are not us. maybe not now, but certainly in the future. we also expect our lover to make rules to govern our desire because we have no trust in the singleness of our sexual desire either. it is ridiculous then, for monogamists to claim they have forbidden each other to have sex with others because they only desire sex with each other.” 

-From this article.

I often say that I think that the only way monogamy should happen is by accident.  If two people really only desire to have sex with each other, then that should just happen without them having to set rules for each other.

I am also anti-marriage.  I think the institution of marriage is harmful.  In our society marriage is romanticized and idealized, and people who are in marriages or marriage-like relationships experience couple privilege and many governmental, financial and societal benefits. We are pressured and incentivized to be married because without being married we don't get these things. I would rather we abolish marriage for everyone than bring more people into this normative and coercive institution.  Especially for queer folks, It doesn’t make sense to me to idealize joining into this piece of straight, normative culture.  

Here are a couple resources about marriage:

A TED talk about the origins of marriage and how it plays out

an article, Marriage Will Never Set Us Free, specifically about marriage in the context of its overall unhelpfulness towards queer liberation

A spicy quote from that article: “It is absurd for married people or people who want to marry to paint themselves as victims of judgment when someone critiques the institution of marriage while the entire society is organized to support them for marrying.”

I totally get why people would choose to date.*  People want to get their needs met and dating seems like the way to ensure that they do.  I don’t actually think dating will ensure that you get your needs met.  You can’t rely on one person to meet all your needs.  And I don’t want any one person to feel obligated to fulfill my needs at any given time.  

Instead I try to focus on building community so that I have many connections and sources of support and intimacy.  Hopefully I will be able to get my needs met at any given time, from one or more of the people in my life, who have the capacity and are excited to do it. And I will be able to do the same for the many people in my life that I care about.

Checkout the Aromantic Manifesto @aromanticmanifesto for some thoughts on queerer, more expansive ways of relating to each other. 

For a bunch of zines and other resources related to RA stuff, checkout the RAD community library!

There are definitely some spicy takes in some of those articles ;P I love it, but if you have pretty normative relationship politics at present, they might be a bit scary.

*I also want to mention that I’m not trying to judge people who are married or in rule-based relationships.  Those are the norm and they are highly incentivized by society. Even if you agree with me that these systems are problematic, It’s hard to do something outside of the norm, especially when you don’t have a significant amount of support and like-minded community. I’m critiquing what I believe is a coercive system, not judging individuals.

[brexiiton]

Jacob Graham: Left-wing anarchist jailed for 13 years over terror offences after declaring he wanted to kill at least 50 people

The security services uncovered Jacob Graham's activity as part of an investigation into the purchase of chemicals online, it can be disclosed.

By Duncan Gardham, Tuesday 19 March 2024 09:17 UK

A left-wing anarchist has been jailed for 13 years for preparing acts of terrorism by compiling and sharing a bomb-making manual, after declaring he wanted to kill at least 50 people.

Jacob Graham, 20, from Norris Green, Liverpool, dedicated his manual, called the "Freedom Encyclopaedia", to "misfits, social nobodies, anarchists, [and] terrorists past and future, who want to fight for freedom against the government".

The judge said the college student was a "dangerous young man", adding that Graham described himself "as the first UK home-grown terrorist".

The security services uncovered Graham's activity as part of an investigation into the purchase of chemicals online, it can be disclosed.

When they raided the home he shared with his mother and sister, they discovered he had filmed bomb-making experiments in his back garden and buried supplies in a secret woodland hide in Formby, Merseyside.

In a document called "My Plan", Graham wrote he wanted to kill at least 50 people by attacking government buildings and politicians' houses.

He also made 138 videos, to be released on the day of an attack, in which he demonstrated explosives and talked about "Judgement Day" and "standing up for working-class people".

On a wall in his bedroom, Graham had printed out a picture of a car bomb exploding with the words: "Make politicians afraid to start their cars again."

'Destro the Destroyer'

Graham, a computer science student, used the name "Destro the Destroyer" and communicated with like-minded extremists using a gaming platform called Discord.

On another platform called Telegram, he exchanged messages with others who shared his hatred of government in groups called Earth Militia, Total Earth Liberation and Neo Luddite Action.

Sentencing him to 13 years in a young offenders institution, with five years on extended licence, the judge, Mr Justice Goose, said those who knew Graham believed he was an "ordinary young man" with an interest in fireworks, the military and outdoor pursuits.

"In reality, however, you are a dangerous young man, you described yourself as the first UK home-grown terrorist," the judge added.

Graham was the administrator for a number of chatrooms on the encrypted Telegram app, including one called Total Earth Liberation Group, with 150 members, into which he shared his bomb-making manual.

Graham told police he was "left-wing" but "more like an anarchist", adding: "I don't like the idea of a central control and I don't really like the monarchy."

His ideal government would be the size of "Merseyside or Liverpool", he said, adding he supported the Green Party and was an "environmentalist" who did not like the way "corporations act and how they damage the Earth".

He was found guilty by a jury on 23 February of one count of the preparation of terrorist acts, four counts of possession of information for terrorist purposes and two of dissemination of a terrorist publication, between May 2022 and May 2023.

Graham was cleared of one count of preparation of terrorist acts, following the five-week trial.

"I think it is fair to say I was quite anti-government," he told his trial.

"I didn't agree with the idea of it - the way certain things were handled, the pandemic, the cost of living. I didn't agree with a group of small people being able to make decisions that affect a mass."

The court heard Graham came to idolise an American terrorist called Theodore Kaczynski - known as the Unabomber - after watching a Netflix series called Manhunt, and pledged to "finish what he started".

From a remote cabin in Montana, Kaczynski carried out a 17-year mail bombing campaign, in which he targeted technology academics at universities, killing three people and injuring 23.

In his document "My Plan", which Graham started in May 2022, he stated that he was planning a bombing campaign that would end in a shooting spree.

Graham's bedroom. Pic: Greater Manchester Police via PA

"I am going to attack government buildings, politicians [sic] houses, mass murder those who think it is ok to hide their wrong doings [sic] behind money and power but you cannot hide from me. I am aiming for at least 50 deceased and more injured. Any more is a blessing," he wrote.

"I have constant anger, I am a ticking timebomb. I am not sorry for nothing."

Graham made video diaries and said in one: "I've got everything I need to start my revolution."

'Most of us can't afford to heat our homes... there needs to be someone to fix this'

In a video on 21 June, Graham took out a machete with a red handle and tapped the blade, saying: "Can't end my life yet, I have so much carnage to commit."

In another video made in his bedroom on 9 August, he said: "If terrorism is standing up for what you think is right, standing up for the working class people of this country, most of us can't afford to heat our homes or afford food, there needs to be someone to fix this problem. It is my responsibility to do this."

He added: "I will be a homegrown terrorist because I was born on British soil. If they want to call me a justice warrior or a hero, call me that. If they want to call me scum, call me that because I won't be here to listen to all of it."

In another video he threatened to attack Hugh Baird College, which he attended, saying: "I'm f****** ready, f****** bring it, I don't care, I'll kill every single last one of them."

Graham had downloaded a compendium of terrorist publications including the Mujahideen Handbook and the White Resistance Manual, which he stored in a folder called "Alexandria" after the fabled ancient library.

He told his trial he felt like a character in a James Bond or Mission Impossible film or The Last Of Us, a post-apocalyptic TV show.

He said he was "doomsday prepping" for "some sort of possible invasion, civil war, martial law, natural disasters, solar flares, floods, things like that."

[madeleineengland]

The first japanese woman to stake her life in socialist cause and raise her voice on behalf of social justice was Kanno Sugako (1881-1911).

She was one of Japan’s first female anarcho-feminist journalist and advocate of women’s rights, as well as a prolific writer.

She was the author of a series of articles about gender oppression, and a defender of freedom and equal rights for men and women.

At fifteen Kanno was raped and this traumatic experience left her with a lasting sense of shame and guilt, like she was supposed to according to the traditional moral standards in Japan.

Kanno's interest in socialism was aroused when she read an essay by Sakai Toshihiko in which he counseled rape victims not be burdened with guilt.

After reading it, Kanno began to read Sakai's other writings and eventually gravitated to the circle of socialists. And gradually radical ideas became strongly related to Kanno's personal pride and the meaning of her life.

Then she wrote a series of short stories, articles, and essays for many magazines.

At the Muro Shinpō, she published her views regarding socialism:

"Our ideal is socialism, which aims at the equality of all classes. But just as a great building cannot be destroyed in a moment, the existing hierarchical class system, which has been consolidated over many years, cannot be overthrown in a day and a night ... So we [women] must first of all achieve the fundamanetal principle of 'self-awareness', and develop our potential, uplift our character, and then gradually work toward the realization of our ideal".

She was a firm believer in gender equality too, arguing in a Muro Shinpō piece:

"In these postwar years there are many tasks facing the nation in politics, economy, industry, education, and so on. But for us women the most urgent task is to develop our own self-awareness. In accordance with long-standing customs, we have seen as a form of material property. Women in Japan are in a state of slavery. Japan has become an advanced, civilized nation, but we women are still denied our freedom by an invisible iron fence..."

By 1903 Kanno had become interested in many movements.

She joined the "Woman's Christian Temperance Union" due to a personal attraction to a shared belief in charity and reform in gender equality.

In addition, she chastised men for constantly harping on the importance of female chastity. Instead, she argued that men should focus more on being "wise husbands and good fathers", than criticizing women for lacking of it.

She also parteciped in the association called Women's Moral Reform Society, a campaign against the system of concubines and advocating for the independence of women.

Kanno lambasted the official sanctioning of prostitution, disgusted that the Japanese government would allow the sexual exploitation of the daughters of the poor. Furthermore, she also blamed male customers of the various red-light districts.

In june 1908 Kanno attended a socialist-anarchist rally, which would be known as the Red Flag Incident, where red flags were hoisted and anarchist songs were sung. The authorities arrested the leaders of the gathering, and when Kanno went to the police station to demand about her comrades, she was shocked to see the brutal manner in which the men were being beaten.

Furthermore she too was thrown in jail for visiting her friends. This experience convinced Kanno that peaceful change was not possibile under the existing system.

After she was released, she became a firm anarchist.

But before the Red Flag Incident, she was a pacifist. She had joined "Heminsha", an association by Christians and socialists in opposing the Russo-Japanese war, and she published the anti-war short story Zekko (Severed Relations) in October 1903.

In 1910 She had become involved in a plot to produce a bomb to assassinate the Emperor.

Kanno was enthusiastic about carrying out the plan, hoping to emulate Sophia Perovskaya, the woman who had partecipated in the assassination of Alexander II of Russia.

However the plot was uncovered in May 1910 and the leaders were arrested, including Kanno.

She was accused of treason by the Japanese government for what became known as the High Treason Incident.

Kanno bluntly confronted the government, refusing to avoid responsibility. She remarked:

"Basically even among anarchists I was among the more radical thinkers. When I was imprisoned in June 1908 in connection with the Red Flag incident I was outraged at the brutal behavior of the police. I concluded that a peaceful propagation of our principles could not be conducted under these circumstances. It was necessary to arouse the people's awareness by staging riots or a revolution or by undertaking assassinations... I hoped to destroy not only the emperor but other elements too... Emperor Mutsuhito [Emperor Meiji], compared with other emperors in history, seems to be popular with the people and is a good individual. Although I feel sorry for him personally, he is, as emperor, the chief person responsible for the exploitation of the people economically. Politically he is at the root of all the crimes being committed, and intellectually he is the fundamental cause of superstitious beliefs. A person in such a position, I concluded, must be killed."

Later, when the judge asked Kanno if she wished to make a final statement, she stated her only regret was that the plot failed and she feels that she has failed those who sacrifice their lives for the sake of the people.

Kanno was executed by hanging on January 25, 1911, at the age of 29. She was the first woman with the status of political prisoner to be executed in the history of modern Japan.

In her prison diary she wrote: “I am convinced our sacrifice is not in vain. It will bear fruit in the future. I am confident that because I firmly believe my death will serve a valuable purpose I will be able to maintain my self-respect until the last moment on the scaffold. I will be enveloped in the marvelously comforting thought that I am sacrificing myself for the cause. I believe I will be able to die a noble death without fear or anguish.”

In her final entry she wrote of her happiness upon learning that 12 of her fellow defendants were reprieved, and whose lives were spared.

You can read her full diary here: https://libcom.org/history/reflections-way-gallows @historicwomendaily

The Tokio Asahi News commented after her execution: "She lived her life without believing in the gods or spirits. She indulged herself by reading biographies of russian anarchists and nihilists who had given their lives to their so-called principles. It is said that she prided herself as a pioneer among japanese women."

However much she has been criticized for her lifestyle, history cannot forget Kanno's strong commitment to her convinctions, her passionate desire to redress social injustices, her formidable sense of responsability, and her courage.

[rosesinmars]

TONGUE TIED, YUNGBLUD, DOMINIC HARRISON

___ this one is with Dominic and it is an au! Dom is not famous in this one, at least not famous as a singer, but he still is known as YUNGBLUD anyway. Dom is a out law in the eyes of the society. This imagine is related to the Tongue Tied video clip, but I took some ideas (and the pictures below) from hope for the underrated youth, not only the song but the video as well. hope u enjoy! ___

The present year was 2022. And it was all so different.

I would be making an understatement saying that it has been a bad year. It's more like it's been a bad start of a decade.

I can still remember those golden times before the clock turned midnight and the year turned to 2020. The new year's festivities were sabotaged by young people, who interrupted the countdown to speak their minds. All around the world, groups with teenagers and young adults got together to manifest themselves trying to improve a better world. A world that one day would be ruled by them. And even though that they all knew that the politicians and major part of the society itself didn't wanted to hear what they had to say, it would never cross their minds that the SILENCERS project would burst that night, or ever.

That night, the Elders reunited themselves and voted about the Silencers project, due to the the youth riots. The Elders were the leaders of the most powerful countries. The major part, incapable to control the young part of their population, voted in favour of the project and the ones that didn't, end up being beheaded.

And with that, the militarized police force called 'Silencers' marched under the distressed orders of the Elders, rounding up and muting all who crossed their path.

It was a real-life nightmare. Yes I was there, and I got caught. But no one ever got to know about that. Because, at the end of the day, I was the only child of two of the Elders, and what would the other Elders think if I was caught in the middle of the Anarchists?

Anyway, I never thought I would be caught up with the Anarchists. As daughter of Elders, I was taught that anything that they said were facts that shouldn't ever be contested. That was until I met him.

I can still remember his shining green eyes looking at me, so desperate as the Silencers wrapped their nasty hands around me, stopping me from running away with him. The Silencers would never tape my mouth like they did with all the other Anarchists that they caught, due to the direct order of my parents, but God knows what they would do to me. The militarized police force hated the Anarchists. They were raised and trained like that. Completely brain washed.

Before I could be taken away by them, I looked at Dominic once again, our final goodbye. His eyes were stuck in me. I could see the last trace of rebellion in the green of his eyes, right after he turned away from the other Anarchists that were running away, trying to save themselves, as he started to run toward me. I shout as much as I could for him to run away, to save himself, but he would never listen to it. Would that be the last act of defiance of the great YUNGBLUD? The well-known out-law, the second of the leader of the Anarchists. Would he give it all away just for a ride or die type of love?

"I don't want anything to happen to you tonight, I couldn't live with that." he said to me in the afternoon before the new year's night, staring deeply into my eyes, both of his hands cupping my face.

"It will not happen a thing to me, but I will be there by your side. I always will, 'til the end of the line. Ride or die, remember?" I reassured him.

"Ride or die." he assured.

And this time, it probably would be die, and ride nevermore. But never separate. Together until the end of the line, just like we promised. And that was the last time I saw him.

It was never revealed what happened to the Anarchists that were caught that night. Everyone thought they were dead. The Anarchists refused, as always, to lost their hopes. The locked ups couldn't be dead. They just couldn't.

Since the night of the riots, my parents restricted my routines as must as they could. Always keeping me under their sight. But I needed a way out, or at least a way to get in contact with the Anarchists. It wasn't easy at first, but I end up coming up with an idea. And that was the day that I introduced my new boyfriend to my parents.

Every rebellious group needed an insider, and who could be a better insider than their own leader.

Mello was a exemplary citizen in everybody's eyes. The Elders loved him, because he always defended their beliefs. And that was his perfect coverage. No one, I say, not a single soul, not even in their wildest dreams, would ever think about Mello as the leader of the Anarchists. But that's where they all were completely wrong. And now, having a free passport for the house of two of the Elders? That was the greatest made he ever achieved. And all thanks to me.

(___it's Mello because of Marshmello. Mello would be his real name in this imagine. And yes I do know that his real name actually is Christopher)

Mello and I weren't actually together, it was just part of the plan to get him into my house and for me to be all in about the plans of the Anarchists. Mello and my Dominic were best friends, and so, Mello wanted as much as me to set our boy free, this if he was still alive.

Dominic was strong-minded, the type of boy that would never give up, he would fight until his last breath, and Mello and I were really hoping that he wouldn't had have his last breath yet.

As time went by, Mello and my parents got closer than ever, and that was perfect.  As Mello tried to manifest all the same intentions and ideals than my parents, they would look at him as if he was the promising future. And then the day came.

The Elders that were my creators finally invited Mello to a politician meeting. They were interested in include Mello in the Elders, but my brain screamed that it could all just be a trap. But my parents did loved Mello, so it would be all okay, right? My brain couldn't just stop overthink, and I could only wish that Dominic was here with me, no one knew how to keep me calm has he did. But we were doing this for him, to save him, and the others. Maybe this one final push of unity could be the hope we all need.

So, the day which Mello would finally meet the other Elders had arrived, and that was the day when the Anarchists would stike again. With my parents out of home with Mello, I had no problem with escaping home and join the other Anarchists. I would be leading the riot this time.

"Dominic would be proud of you." Mello said to me.

"He will be. He will be." I assured.

Mello also explained me that he and my parents would enter by the back of the precinct owned by the Elders, so he could become already slightly acquainted with the space, and so, their first stop would probably be were the locked up Anarchists would be.

As planned, we all were ready. We were as much hidden as we could, and we would strike when Mello showed up with my parents. We will have the gates open for them, and we will take that chance to enter. Mello will joined us as soon as we got in. I was holding his Marshmello helmet in my hand, the one he always used to not get recognised.

The time finally came up, and everyone around me tensed up knowing that was either the beginning of a new era, or the end of the free minds.

We ran inside as soon as the three of them entered. I ran to my parents handcuffing my mother and father, the other Anarchists covering me with their guns. I lead my way to Mello, making a small reverence, playing with him, before handing him the helmet. My parents eyes were full on rage, I pointed them my guns:

- The locked up Anarchists, now.

- You wouldn't have the guts. We are your parents. — my father said, and I instantly shot one of his feet.

- I do have the guts. And you may be my blood, but you're not my family. — I looked at Mello and the others and they smiled at me. — Now, lead the way. - I demanded, knocking the guns in their heads.

Soon we were in front of the filthy cells where they kept our people locked up. Me and Mello were leading the way now, shooting the locks and freeing everybody and smiling while seeing everyone meeting again with their loved ones. But I didn't yet. Dominic needed to be here. He has to. For me.

I shouted his name every time I unlocked a cell, but I didn’t got a thing until now, this 'till someone grabbed my arm as I was walking by one of the cells. It was a young girl, a ten years old maybe. My eyes were apologetic before I ripped the metal tape muting the child's mouth, she didn't even screamed. She was so strong already.

- I'm so sorry, everything will be fine now. — I said to the girl in front of me, holding her hand.

- He's here. The boy you're looking for. — the little girl said and my eyes instantly widened.

- Please... — I pleaded.

She dragged me into the cell and there was him. His mouth gruesomely shut, but still sitting on the ground helping a young boy with some bruises.

- Dominic... — I whispering, not believing in my own eyes. — Dom...

And his green eyes met with mine, and it was like everything had stopped around us.

I shivered and ran to him, falling into my knees next to him, and throwing myself into his harms.

- I'm so so so sorry, I'm so sorry it took me so long, please forgive me. — I started to cry, and as carefully as I could, I also removed the metal tape from his mouth. — I missed you so much.

- There's wasn't a day I didn't believed that you would come for us, I could never doubt you. — he said, his voice failing for the long time he had been muted. — I love you so much.

- I love you, Dom. — I answered back, while he dried my tears.

I hugged him again, fearing that I could hurt him with a kiss, but soon enough he carefully connected our lips together, and it made it seems like the earth finally got back on its tracks. Everything was falling in place, and I finally had my life back, and I could see it in the green of my lover's eyes.

The Anarchists got their voices back, the Elders were defeated, the Silencers would now fall, and the people were now free to speak their minds and to enjoy their free will.

And this, all thanks to that underrated group of out-laws, with only clarity engulfed inside their eyes, untactful tongues and insightful minds. They now lie here, been torn apart a couple thousand times. But through the fires they arisen unharmed, untouched, unused. Screaming nothing but anthems for this UNDERRATED YOUTH.

the end.

21.Nov.19

[galaxy-notes]

may day notes re: organizing

before covid19 and perhaps before these past 2-3 years, if you were to ask me do i subscribe to one political ideology? i’d say no and just be like i’m a leftist / radical / etc. and i def fuck with anarchists, but i don’t think i am with ONE ideology, no... but now i VERY much see anarchism (which is, truth be told, marx’s original picture of ‘ideal’ communist societies) as an absolutely key piece to the type of radical movement building that’s actually gonna get us to the world we need and want.

i think the combination of covid19 + climate change is unraveling so many things for me and exposing the failure of states as a whole. i was watching INCITE’s abolitionist feminism event today, which left me with something that really stood out: one of the speakers (love them) critiqued the way mutual aid efforts could be co-opted and nonprofit-ized to suit neoliberal capitalism, and how we must hold the state responsible esp to our basic needs. and they also said (paraphrasing) we are in a constant battle between organizing against the state and holding the state accountable. i feel that.

and i’m also like, well which is it? if these states don’t serve us especially in times of crisis, then what could we possibly demand from them?

i truly believe that our ideal image of the world (an image free from oppression, centralization and domination) isn’t some far future, but something that we should be practicing now - which is what anarchists are all about - and something that actually many radical, localized movements are already doing (even if they don’t use the label anarchist* - that’s cool, too). if we don’t start now, we’ll never be able to set it into motion whenever that future arrives. but the idea that it’s something in the “far future” is untrue. for some, pieces of that future are already here. some communities are already set up with solidarity or alternative economies, indigenous folks have been practicing self-governance for ages, and movements have adopted diff practices like decentralization, mutual aid (practiced in many rad disabled/queer/trans communities and most def survivor-led, abolitionist transformative justice groups), radical healing, survival skill sharing and consensus decision-making. getting involved in local movement ecosystems shows us that anarchism isn’t something “pie in the sky,” it’s actually a way of being in the truest forms of community with each other - as independent of the state and interdependent with each other as much as possible.

we are at an unprecedented time and a crisis. we are facing existential threats that we’ve never faced before. we need to radically shift our organizing in a way that meets what we’re up against - not just climate change, covid19 and the start of a series of economic collapses, but fascism at its peak, including increased militarization, advanced weaponry and surveillance tech that is most definitely going to used (and strengthened) against the most vulnerable among us. the surveillance state, the carceral state, the billionaires, and corporate conglomerates may have been resourced and preparing for years, but the rest of us... we are, altogether, very unprepared for this.

we cannot return to the world the way it was before. we cannot be waiting on a political savior to come and rescue us. we cannot turn to the government and beg that they give us basic human rights. we cannot be demanding (which is still asking for permission) corporations and negotiate through meetings and achieve wins after campaigning for months or even years. we cannot continue to simply rely on unions or ask for more jobs when that doesn’t get to the core of what is denying us the things we need to survive + thrive as full human beings. we do not have time to wait for policymakers and politicians and legislature to pass proposals because this planet is not waiting for us. we need to let go of old models of organizing and begin prioritizing forms of direct action organizing that gets the goods directly and immediately from the source, and most importantly, does not ask nor wait for permission. we need to see ourselves (evolve) in a new way: as leaders and decision-makers of our own lives and communities. fully autonomous with strong, adaptive networks of support.

we needed to fucking end the carceral state, yesterday. we needed to end poverty, yesterday. we needed to get folks into safe houses and into communities of care and support, yesterday. folks who don’t have houses, folks who are in abusive ones, folks occupied and surveillled daily by law enforcement and the US military, folks in prisons and detention centers represent some of the most vulnerable members in our communities. if we do not abolish the state and all its institutions that make these conditions possible for the *most marginalized,* we will end up with a reform “movement” disguised as a “revolution” led by liberals and well-meaning leftists. and the result? continued state violence. the difference? new institutions that provide “band-aid” solutions, but unfortunately set up to allow the exact same forms of violence again, enacted and shadow-led by white supremacists, war criminals and monsters like jeff b*zos. we need to completely redefine “wealth” so that billionaires don’t even get the slightest chance to emerge victorious, where global capitalism is fully abolished - and that starts with creating alternative ways of living and being with one another.

i am feeling a great sense of urgency to get together, thoroughly learn what is coming for us and what is already here, and engage in deep strategy. this requires us to plan how we create and further alternative systems of living + continue to engage in direct action organizing that supports a diversity of tactics and fundamentally challenges what or who is legal/illegal.

as an immigrant/settler on colonized grounds, i recognize how decolonization will be (and always has been) at the center of this upcoming shift. as someone whose family and ancestors were not forced captive and stolen from their homelands to be exploited on stolen land, i am aware that if indigenous (+black) folks want me off, i am ready to pack my bags and go. (edit: in re-reading this after having learned about indigenous sovereignty and what that looks like, this does not make much sense as the land does not “belong” to people, at least not in the way we currently perceive of land ownership under colonial conditions). if not, indigenous leadership (across borders) must be at the forefront when it comes to how to we restore our relationship to this land, with ourselves and with each other. although not indigenous (in nepali terms) myself, i am prepared to bring in my people’s own ancestral knowledge of the land and community healing to uplift this practice. i am also prepared to bring in my personal reflections, including everything i learned from experiences with my family and my childhood to newfound knowledge and wisdom i have (and am currently) building up through mentor- and community-based relationships where i am. 

we are faced with a unique moment we could not have predicted, and this requires us to open our mind to every radical possibility.

there is no going back.

*especially important to note if communities don’t use the term ‘anarchist’ because they have their own definition of how they exist and relate to one another independent of the state 

[tidalpunk]

Thinking critically about solarpunk

Any and all movements, however casual or fictional as that of solarpunk, that aim for a better society must not be afraid of self-reflection. Spurred to some degree by the discussion that lead to solarpunk being excluded from Wikipedia (both as its own page and as as a derivative of Cyberpunk), I’d like to post a couple of things about the ways in which I think that we should probably consider how we go about our designs and consumption of the movement itself. In keeping with the generally anarchist and non-prescriptivist ideals of solarpunk, I shall make a concerted effort not to address any of the following concerns as “musts” and “mustn’t"s, as tempting as that may be, but as “could"s and “probably”. This is not a manifesto about what solarpunk should be, but a suggestion for how we engage with the topics that give us our material ideals, based loosely on our societal ideals.

1) Attribution, inspiration and creation:

While a foundation is built on a understanding of existing designs, we may endeavour to distinguish between what is inspiring solarpunk, what is being created with a similar ethos to solarpunk, and what is actually being designed with solarpunk in mind during its creation. We are in very formative years, but we could learn to not point at things we like and go “that’s solarpunk!” but rather “that is in keeping with solarpunk”. Otherwise we run the risk of assuming that solarpunk is more defined than it is, and of essentially misappropriating creators’ works for our own gains. (I’m sideyeing the TV tropes page for solarpunk here, but it’s by far not the only place where solarpunk fans have taken the approach of just appropriating anything).

2) Historical Context:

To think we can create something good and beautiful in our present or future without careful analysis of the past reeks of naïvety. Almost the entirety of what I’ve found about solarpunk has been about what is wrong and how we can move into the future, but nothing about where these, our, ideals have sprouted elsewhere in history.

For example, our primary aesthetic point of reference is Art Nouveau. Art Nouveau, for context, was a late-Imperial European movement that relied heavily on a form of Orientalism that fetishised Ancient Egyptian designs and Japanese cultural traditions. Furthermore, Art Nouveau was inspired heavily by/ grew from the Arts and Crafts movement of England’s late Romantic period, which was largely lead by William Morris, who practically straight-out copied the designs of his carpets he’d bought from the Middle East (which you can view, fittingly, at the V&A museum in London). However, it must be recognised that he was a major player in the British socialist movement that ultimately lead to things such as the NHS, and that the Arts and Crafts movement was a reaction to Industrialisation and mass-production, a direct predecessor to our intrinsic DIY ideals.

This is, of course, a very quick note on just one aspect of our cultural heritage, and should I have time, or anyone want to collaborate with me, I’d like to see some parts that specifically analyse our points of inspiration in comparison to our ideals. Topics would include a more in-depth analysis of our relationship with the Art Nouveau and the Arts and Crafts movement; the hippie ideals and movements of the second half of the 20th century; socialist and anarchist practice; scientific theories and advancements; the general history of industrialisation; solarpunk’s relations to the other -punks and to Punk; our relationship to afrofuturism; and then to ecofiction and ecomodernism. And others, taking for example the note from Adam Flynn’s solarpunk manifesto:

“Solarpunk draws on the ideal of Jefferson’s yeoman farmer, Ghandi’s ideal of swadeshi and subsequent Salt March, and countless other traditions of innovative dissent.”

Such things have been brought up here and there, and I shall provide links to essays that are relevant, but a continuation of these analyses could only strengthen solarpunk. I intend, at the least, to create a masterpost at some point (?) of critical pieces relevant to solarpunk and historical context, and any help towards that would be wonderful.

3) Present context:

One of the great things, I believe, about solarpunk, is that we are willing to look in any and all directions to find resources to inform our practice and theory. This, however, is best done with an awareness of how interacting and being inspired by different groups affects us and them.

For example, in our endeavours to be open and accessible, we reach for ideas from indigenous populations. While considering them is definitely good, to most effectively promote sustainability of societies, autonomy, well-being and environments, treading carefully so as not to repeat the behaviours of the colonialist principles that come before us is vital. Should we wish to take into our theories or practice any of the concepts of these groups, we must make sure we have their full consent, cooperation, and leadership, because to do otherwise is to exploit or endanger them. To recognise individuals who are already are members of these groups who are already within our group is paramount. I’m personally fond of the relationship @noaasanctuaries have with Native American groups, but I’m no expert and would rather refer to the expertise of others.

On the other side of the same coin is the consideration of our relationships to Class. For example, I make a conscious effort to not promote luxury hotels on here, including the ones that are set up to look like traditional huts, as their exclusiveness, excess, and exploitation is in direct antithesis to our values. I’m sure I’ll make mistakes, and I’d like to hope that followers that notice my mistakes will point them out to me. To romanticise aesthetic over other considerations is to make solarpunk vulnerable to becoming yet another trend with all the superficiality and none of the substance. It is a tricky line to tread, as the rich will also more readily have access to the futuristic technology and resources we would like to eventually have available to all so not all fancy things can be discounted. And stealing some of the ideas of the rich so as to make them accessible rather than exclusive isn’t a bad thing, as far as I’m concerned. Again, this is about critical consumption, rather than “this is bad and this is good”.

Reading list:

Elvia Wilk: “Is Ornamenting Solar Panels a Crime?” - a broad contextualisation of solarpunk, which I thoroughly recommend. April 2018. https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/positions/191258/is-ornamenting-solar-panels-a-crime/

Sam Keeper (@stormingtheivorytower, currently on hiatus) : “Hack monuments: the methods of -punk” - another read I particularly recommend, August 2017  http://www.stormingtheivorytower.com/2017/08/hack-monuments-methods-of-punk.html

@solarpunks​ : “solarpunk: a reference guide” - what it says on the can, dating from 2008 onwards. Last update Feb 2018. https://medium.com/solarpunks/solarpunk-a-reference-guide-8bcf18871965

Adam Flynn: “solarpunk: notes toward a manifesto”, 2014 https://hieroglyph.asu.edu/2014/09/solarpunk-notes-toward-a-manifesto/

Andrew Dana Hudson: “on the political elements of solarpunk”. The main premise of this essay, as with most, is speculative, but you get critical notes every now and then, such as “Nat Geo poverty porn”, fetishism of slums. https://medium.com/solarpunks/on-the-political-dimensions-of-solarpunk-c5a7b4bf8df4

Connor Owens: “What is Solarpunk?” https://solarpunkanarchists.com/2016/05/27/what-is-solarpunk/

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

Anarchy: The Life and Joy of Insubordination

In this essay I substitute “wage-slave” for “worker” since there are many different ideas of what “work” could mean. I am also considering the fact that “worker” is socially loaded with congratulatory appraisal as it conceals the true nature of it’s meaning: slave. Here I criticize “wage-slave” as a role and identity assigned to individuals by a system that requires their physical and mental subjugation en masse. The “wage-slave” is only such, as long as one fulfills that role and identity. Beneath that role and identity is a chaotic uniqueness which arms the individual with emancipatory potential.

When people ask “What is “anarchy”?”, my answer is rarely a reference to the popular philosophers of history who define it academically as an “ism”. My personal relationship to anarchy is one of constant exploration and discovery. For me, what differentiates anarchy from any other political idea is the anti-politics of its practice. As an anarchist, I have no inclination to recruit a mass of people to overthrow the establishment. I have no desire to construct persuasive programs encouraging the “worker” to join a party, vote, fight for better wages -let alone remain as a wage-slave. All I have is an anarchist project of my own: the reclaiming of my life from wage-slavery and social control. It is a project of self-preservation armed with hostility to all that attempts to categorize, confine, and control me.

Things we come to familiarize ourselves with like presidential elections, the police, banks, and wage-slavery are all social systems constructed to maintain order – an order maintained through coercion, disempowerment, and fear. Together these things make up the governmental establishment which occupies and applies ownership to geographical locations. The maintaining of this occupation relies heavily on an apparatus that monopolizes violent force, as well as the subjugation of any persons residing in these locations. The subjugation of a population of people wouldn’t succeed without the normalized logic of submission and psychological warfare. In order to gain access to the monopolized resources needed to survive, the conquered population of people are forced to reproduce and maintain the establishment through wage-slavery: enslavement in exchange for a monetary wage. At the root of this social control is the domination of the individual – a domination which reinforces the logic of individual submission to the group. For the sake of the leftist wet-dream, imagine every individual wage-slave deciding to quit their job, all at once, and all those who didn’t have a job deciding against getting one. Those few who monopolize resources would quickly lose everything and everyone they needed to protect them. With the expropriation of violent force, these individuals could unite and destroy those maintaining hierarchical power. But as years have shown, the continuity of capitalism and the slave-master relationship is complex and reinforced in a variety of ways.

As an anarchist against work, I will still validate the wage-slave’s stress and fear of poverty, their personal justifications for submitting to slavery and the colossal misery that accompanies these things. I can not deny the power of materialist accumulation, consumerism, and the toxic escapism which acts to distract and pacify outrage. I have seen apathy personalized as a lifelong commitment, embraced by those too emotionally defeated to break the chains of capitalism’s captivity. The idea of mass revolt would be ideal, but is unfortunately utopian. The workplace is constantly evolving to be more accommodating to the wage-slave. This includes, but not limited to, serving as a remedy for boredom, a platform for social networking and emotional comfort through economic security. These small personal relationships with work play a big role is stunting efforts to organize mass worker revolt. In other words, many people enjoy wage-slavery, and will even sabotage efforts to organize against it. It is inaccurate to assume people are one monolithic mass willing to rise up against the establishment. But rather than relying on a mass revolt, there is the power of uncontrollable, unpredictable individual revolt. These revolts are composed of cells or “lone wolf” individuals who make revolt a daily practice rather than a future phenomena to wait for. As an ex-wage-slave, I will validate the unique history and personhood of a wage-slaving individual, their desire for freedom and the suppressed rage that accompanies their contempt for what they do. I will validate their hatred for every social construct of domination that compresses them. I will validate a wildness they keep caged up in fear of being called “crazy” or “weird”. I will validate a behavioural uniqueness they possess which society would attempt to pathologize and eliminate to maintain psychiatric standardization.

So many norms, roles, and identities shoved down our throats from birth - is it really a surprise that the oppressed “workers of the world” haven’t smashed capitalism to pieces by now? Where in the prison of society do we find the encouragement to not only be our unique wild selves, but to also weaponize our hostility towards the societal apparatus of control? Individuality, often promoted within the confinement of a pre-constructed identity – one assigned at birth and necessary for the functioning of capitalist society – is defined by society rather than the chaos of indefinite, ungoverned self-discovery. Due to the anthropocentric lens through which we view the world, wildness is moralized as an evil savagery in need of domesticating and management. Wildness is the enemy of the technological colonization of the natural world. So what does anarchist wildness look like? Anarchy as wildness refuses the control and domination of socially constructed systems which subjugate individuality. Where ever there is social constructs attempting to subjugate individual uniqueness, there is a politicized program at play. This program (which often attempts to acquire a dominating position) is responsible for normalizing a standardized way of life in which individual people are reduced from complex ever-changing beings to the identity of “worker”, or - for the sake of this essay -“wage-slave”.

What does it mean to be ungovernable? Within ungoverned self-discovery come questions of survival. Without the instinct of survival, the capitalists who profit from the products of my labor would have no leverage to enslave me. Food, shelter, etc. are essentials that require the labor of others to maintain. Under systems that require a mass of people to maintain, individuals are discouraged from finding the power to acquire their own food and/or create their own shelter. Today, shelter (industrial buildings fixed up with plumbing, electricity, etc) are manufactured by one group of people (wage-slaves) and sold to, and occupied by others (consumers). Alienation can be found here where those purchasing or renting space have no direct connection to its construction. Just the same as when people purchase food in grocery stores, they are disconnected from the true source of that food (slaughterhouses, for example) since someone else puts in the work to harvest, process, and package it. The leverage capitalist society maintains over every individual is that of survival. Through monopolizing resources, those with the most can enslave those with the least. So what way do anarchists survive if they refuse the role and identity of “wage-slave”? If an individual decides to arm their desires with action, how does that individual refuse enslavement to a boss or master and continue maintaining access to resources? Under capitalism, the expropriation of resources from those who monopolize them is considered illegal. This is where anarchism breaks away from the civilized notions of social reform and finds affinity with illegality.

I can only speak for myself when I talk about illegalist anarchy since for every individual, their interpretation will be influenced by circumstances unique to their experience. There is also an entire history rich with illegalist anarchy taking place in the early 1900s around the globe, and continuing on today. For the purpose of this particular essay I will be focusing on illegality related to resource expropriation as an argument against wage-slavery. So from this perspective, illegalist anarchy is the refusal to confine my anarchist activity to an above-ground, liberalized, mass-appeal activity. It is the daily practice of experimenting with methods of survival that refuse the limiting moral code of law and order. It is the weaponizing of chaos from which I find courage and strength in joyfully discovering new ways of surviving – all of which circumnavigate wage-slavery. I have grown sick and tired of bosses, workplaces, and forcing my body to wake up with the sound of a blaring alarm. I am in full retirement from wage-slavery at the age of thirty-three, and I have absolutely no desire to turn back. So, how do I eat? How do I survive without a paycheck from a workplace to sell my labor? A reality that is often difficult to remember is that everything one needs to survive already exists all around. In addition to poly-crop guerrilla gardening and foraging, food is stockpiled high in grocery stores. Tools for creativity and sabotage are hoarded by hardware stores. Dumpsters are filled to the brim with a variety of resources. What has been stolen from the individual is a sense of direct connection to these resources. Through learned consumerism, people see themselves as merely consumers- basically, “If I don’t have the money for this food, I just go hungry tonight.”. Through fear, capitalism along with the state has pacified a healthy outrage that could motivate us to take the resources needed to survive. This is another form of alienation – but one that keeps the consumer passive: if you make something with your own hands, you feel more connection to it as yours. But when someone else makes it and you see it in a store window, there is no direct connection. Therefore, there is less emotional justification for outrage or motivation to break the barrier of law and fear. Similar to the factory jobs I worked where a single product was put together by multiple people. If each person is only responsible for producing a piece of the whole product, there is no direct connection between the production of that product as a whole, and the individual worker. Therefore, the wage-slave doesn’t develop a relationship with what they produce, because a single product is produced by multiple people.

Rather than celebrating individualism, this process glorifies workplace collectivism- a useful tool in encouraging productivity and unifying “workers” for the common good of capitalism. What is socially discouraged in the individual is a creative rebellion that crafts plans and ideas on how to undermine the security apparatus that protects resources. Store cameras, Loss Prevention officers (or as some of us call them for short “LP’s”), magnetic security devices attached to items, etc. While one individual spends their time and energy at work and maybe planning what bills to pay next, the ex- wage-slave individual has the opportunity to utilize free time to experiment with different ideas on how to get shit for free. Eight hours of committed work at a factory (or grocery store, office place, etc.) could be eight hours of strategic planning, assessing, and experimenting with illegalist activity.

Another opportunity is the wage-slaving individual experimenting with illegalist activity within the workplace. Of course, the stakes are a little higher since the individual would have surrendered personal information to obtain the job, but an inside-the-workplace perspective can offer an opportunity to exploit weaknesses in work-place security. Though, personally, I haven’t met many people who take much advantage of this. And this is probably due to the fact that they depend on the job in a way that outweighs any advantages of work-place theft.

Coming back to the anti-work perspective on illegalism, when it comes to the resources of survival, the time not surrendered to wage-slavery can be time put towards careful planning, personal fear-assessment, and target seeking.

As society forces us into schools to begin the indoctrination sequence of behavioural conformity and obedience, we have very little opportunity to learn about ourselves and our capabilities. Between school and our homes, playgrounds and neighbourhood streets, we’re allowed a regulated time-frame of play. From my own perspective, play is the materialization of imaginative desire, exploration, and discovery. Each of these are fundamental tools necessary in observing and comprehending one’s environment and their relationship to it. Embedded in that relationship is a “self” that is composed of experiences and personal desires. But with such a narrow time-frame, a young individual only has a limited scope of exploration and instead, with development, begins internalizing the rhetoric of consumerist, productive, and responsible adultism.

For real though - what can most people say about themselves and the lives they live? Aside from a few forms of escapism or maybe hobby activities that stem from personal desire, many peoples lives are just wage-slavery, paying bills, paying for materialist shit and wage-slave some more to stockpile (save) money. Shit, people spend most of their lives using the present to prepare or secure a future- the existence of a future which is often taken for granted in the first place. So how much can one know about their self when so much of the “self” is being constricted, conditioned, and defined in terms of wage-slave productivity? Whether class or social, the status of an individual under capitalism is determined by their access to, and relationship with, materialism. But what about a “self” unbound by capitalism, and insubordinate to materialist representation? Or a “self” that refuses the traditional categorical assignments of social constructs and embraces life as anarchistic existence? A life of illegalist anarchy then allows for the limitless possibilities of creating one’s self day by day.

In my opinion, refusing the wage-slave role and identity destabilizes social control on an individual level. Since it is a firm work ethic that must be drilled into the individual to secure the foundation of capitalism (or any system that requires massified subjugation for its sustainability), individuals who refuse wage-slavery are subjected to a variety of social pressures including personal judgement, ridicule and the threat of poverty. To build up a confidence in one’s self that is immune to the social pressures of being talked down to (as well as a confidence in ones creative, determined self to avoid poverty), is to reclaim power as an individual. It is a power that reclaims “self” from the role and identity of “proletariat”, “worker”, or “wage-slave”.

Like chaotic negation to all socially fixed identities, there is power in contradicting the social identity and expectation of the “wage-slave”. This power also undermines the assumption that “the group” (or formalized organization, society, the masses etc.) is stronger than the individual. If “the group” is unable to subjugate an individual, that individual carries the potential to inspire the emancipation of other individuals from “the group”. A group, or systemic establishment, is only as powerful as the subservience of the individuals who comprise it. Without subservient individuals to reinforce the power of “the group”, there is no group - only empowered individuals.

The power of presidents, politicians, the police, and the military industrial complex, economic systems of every form and social constructs require the subservience of individuals. Without individual participation, the continuity of any system unravels. This is what makes individuality not only important but also powerful. Under capitalism, refusing wage-slavery requires courage; assimilatory subservience is psychologically coerced with the threat of starvation and poverty. The logic of submission is only negated through a fearless self-confidence and the desire to become socially ungovernable.

Could an individualist anarchist change the world? As unlikely as it seems, who am I to say no? Different people are inspired by different things. To some, a personal relationship with someone else’s words can shatter a worldview. Those same words armed with the actions of an individual could spark flames of social insubordination, possibly multiplying into spontaneous fires of joyful emancipation. It is not the leadership of deceptive, double speaking academics or committees (invisible or not), political schemes, or popular catch phrases that ignite personal rebellion. In my opinion and experience, it is the discovery and re-claiming of “self” as powerful, unique, and wild. From this perspective, anarchist illegality negates the domesticated conformity of internalized workerism. Illegalist anarchy confronts law and order with insurgency, preserving wild chaos as individuality against the homogenizing effect of society. To reclaim and reinvent one’s life as a daily exploration of personal adventure is anarchy against the socialized guilt and pressure to abandon rebellious youth.

Wage-slavery is the enemy of play, individuality, and freedom. Social systems require the subjugation of individuality to either homogenized membership or fixed group-identities in order to maintain their existence. With all social systems the formula is similar: individuality is surrendered to the group in order to be granted access to resources. Under capitalism, the wage-slave - or in Marxist terms, “the proletariat” - is an identity pre-configured with the role of reproducing capitalist society. This includes an individual surrendering their mind and body to a master in exchange for a wage that serves as the permission slip to access resources. But to the anarchist individual armed with the illegality of resource expropriation, anarchy is survival without permission.

Anarchy can not be experienced through history books, the reformation of work places nor the confines of a new societal system. Anarchy breathes with the rhythm of the wild in constant flux, ungoverned by anthropocentric laws and order. I rejoice my anarchy in the transformative abandonment of the role and identity of “the proletariat”. There is no great future revolution on the horizon to organize or wait for. There is only today, with no guarantee of tomorrow. There are no charismatic leaders to open the door to freedom. There is only the power of anarchist individuality defined by the liberating ammunition of desire.

[cactusnotes]

Ethical Egoism

Normative, Teleological, Subjective, Agent-Focused Ethical Theory. “Psychological Egoism is a theory of human nature that purports to describe what motivates people to act. Ethical egoism...is normative. It purports to well us how people ought to act.” - Driver

Agent focused ethic based on self-interest as opposed to altruism: altruism is the attitude of acting for the sake of others, egoism is based on self-interest. Ethical egoism is the act of being rationally selfish, as it’s our purpose for the long term. 

In fact, using reason, it is clear our telos is our own interest: denying your own needs isn’t just. It rejects deontology, since laws restrict our own needs, and psychological egoism. It does not matter whether we are all intrinsically egotistical, we have to act so, it’s our telos. 

Ethical theory that matches the moral agent's psychological state (psychological egoism): the belief that every action is rooted in one’s own self interest, makes one happy, to avoid pain. It’s not inherently negative or bad--nobody has to be ruthless and cruel, just not selfless. Furthermore, selfish lacks real meaning. A social construct, motives, actual acts, avoiding worse?We cannot truly judge one’s motives, so it’s unfalsifiable, thus not a real science to some. However, psychological is different to ethical, as it supports things like short term interest: drinking alcohol. 

Concentration on long term self-interests rather than short term interests: in the short term unselfishness could lead to longer term selfishness satisfied. This thus rejects material gain, and pure selfishness (contributing to a union of egoists). 

 Max Stirner, is self-interest the root cause of every human action even if it appears altruistic: inspired by Hegel, his quiet life didn’t reflect chaotic writing. Influenced: Nietzsche, Marx, anarchy. 

Psychological egoism is correct to an extent: some ethical decisions are made in self interest. However, we don’t know what the self is, so we cannot seek self-interest actively, it’s ambiguous. Someone who feels they are a slave, and are obliged to act as such, are not being themselves. Actions done with the idea that there is no other option (actually or metaphorically) are not self. 

Language and rationality are human inventions that haunt and restrict their maker, the maker lost. Religious, philosophical systems of ethics and instinct are ‘essences’ and ‘ghosts’ in our decisions. 

Einzige = the ego. 

“There is no sinner and no sinful egoism” - Stirner.

Actual egoism exists outside of the systems we are slaves to, once we have found out ‘ownness’. 

Our telos is to gain mastery over our owness and live through this ‘unique’ self we have. 

“Totally different from this free thinking is own thinking, my thinking, a thinking which does not guide me, but is guided, continued, or broken off, by me at my pleasure.” - Stirner. 

These structures are deeply integrated into us, seen in fears of nakedness, naturalness, selfishness. Institutions cannot be good in themselves, we must discover our ‘self’ which will say what’s right. They probably aren’t right though, as they hinder self development, and enforce rules. Philosophers aren’t exempt--they reject God but follow his laws? Agree incest is wrong?

“I decided whether it is the right thing in me; there is no right outside of this” - Stirner.

Analogy: giving to the hopeless, party psychological egoism, partly social expectations, guilt. However, there are charities for the homeless, so we don’t need to do it, we were reluctant to do it. 

Stirner is not amoral, he rejects institutions, and we need to select our own laws from them. 

“Do not seek for freedom...seek for yourself...just recognise what you really are, and let go of your hypocritical endeavours, your foolish mania to be something else than you are.” - Stirner. 

Eigenheit is ownness, different from the perceived self, is the idea of mastering oneself. To be free includes rejecting the subconscious ideals, ideologies, religious or philosophical concepts. Only this way can you pursue, selfishly. 

“He is an unfree man in the garment of freedom” - Stirner.

Owness is a descriptor, not an idea (like religion and morality) but leads to ideas like freedom. 

“What’s good, what’s bad? Why, I am my own concern, and I am neither good nor bad.” - Stirner. 

Einzig is uniqueness. To appreciate yourself is ownness; to apply owness is to become unique. You are the only person who owns your ‘self’, which means you are unique!

“Egoism does not think of sacrificing anything...it simply decides what I want I must have.” - Stirner.

If everyone was unique, it doesn’t make everyone equal, equality is an enslaving ideology. Nor are people unequal, rather they are all unique, individual, incomparable or able to be equated. 

He uses the analogy of the Protestant reformation: meant to reduce control, and inspire individual faith, but instead made more things religious, like priests marrying, and intensified internal conflict. 

If you voted for a rule, you’re free to break it, so not to be bound by “my will of yesterday”. 

Stirner’s view of love is kind of dodgy, where it is only when you ‘enjoy’ the other person: not love. 

“We are all in the midst of an abundance; now shall I not help myself?” - Stirner, meaning unknown. 

Rejection of egoism for material gain:

Sensual appetites are also rejected by the self, or else the self has an obligation, an emotional attachment, a link to society’s expectations. You serve your future, act in a way that’s genuinely good for yourself, or else you're not an egoist, which rejects material gain. 

Union of egoists:

There is no obligation to be equal, but also no obligation to be cruel, materialistic, or anarchist. 

Stirner advocated for co-operation between egos, not to own each other, but for practicality. 

The sole purpose of a community like this, a union of egoists, is to help people find their selves.

This union is a society where cooperation prevailed in recognition of everyone's uniqueness. 

It is true, honest, respectful, impermanent, supportive of all goals, with no goal in the union itself. 

It has no actual authority of value, it is a co-worker of autonomy. A support system, not actual. 

Stirner sees no need to reject the state, but believes it will fall away naturally for this union. 

Destruction of a community ethos:

Society weakens if there is no common good produced. But if everyone’s happy...who cares? It may lead to anarchy and social chaos, as if the union of egoists doesn’t exist and we’re all beasts. There’s no security to fulfil our own self interest, which goes against its own ideas. But that’s what the Union is for. 

Social injustices could occur as individuals put their own interests first:

Some could argue that rape, racism and conflict are allowed as it is satisfying for the person. However, this is inherently short term, and takes away other’s own fulfilment of self interest. It doesn’t matter to him, his audience’s feelings are of no issue. He does not condemn the widow who strangles her infant, incest, murder, and the like, which could all be justified. 

A form of bigotry (why is one moral agent more important than any other?):

Prioritising yourself is wrong, selfish, and discrimination of others. However, the alternative is you prioritise others, which is also bigotry, as you downplay your own relevance, discriminating against yourself. 

Furthermore, focusing on yourself isn’t inherently selfish or discrimination: focusing on art doesn’t discriminate against science. Our world is literally ourselves, it’s only rational to do so. We cannot confirm anything outside ourselves, so why should we focus on the uncertain over certain?

How can one fulfil or find themselves if they’re subject to prejudice, bigotry, or clashing interest? However, that is their own fault, for not escaping their society’s opinion, so they pay the price. 

[appalachiananarchist]

Hi Kaitlyn! Your post on matching popped up on my dash, congrats! I was poking around your blog, and I realized I'm not super educated on anarchy. Would you be willing to sum up the aim and the vision, in your point of view? I know you're probably busy getting ready for your move, so I understand if you can't! I've just been feeling ultra frustrated with some of the "realities" of medicine in America lately, so I'm intrigued!

I am going to begin with a Lucy Parsons quote that I love: “The philosophy of anarchism is included in the word “Liberty”; yet it is comprehensive enough to include all things else that are conducive to progress. No barriers whatever to human progression, to thought, or investigation are placed by anarchism; nothing is considered so true or so certain, that future discoveries may not prove it false; therefore, it has but one infallible, unchangeable motto, “Freedom.” Freedom to discover any truth, freedom to develop, to live naturally and fully.”

In a literal sense, anarchism means a system with “no rulers.” It places at its core respect for the absolute autonomy of all people—that is, the ability to live as you please without domination by another. It fights against rulers, authorities, bosses, and any others who restrict the autonomy or will of another person by forcing, coercing, dominating, or hurting them. Not only do anarchists oppose power/authority/rulers based on our ideals, but we oppose them practically: we have seen, as evidenced by history, that power is inevitably and always abused to cause more harm than good, no matter how “good” the initial intentions were. In summary, anarchists oppose all manifestations of power in society for both practical and ideological reasons, the two most well-known manifestations of this being the state and capitalism.

We oppose capitalism and the state because the offending parties dominate, or control and inhibit the full autonomy of others, within a territory they claim to own. Some will excuse their domination by saying that if they have a rightful ownership claim to the land, they have the right to control what happens on it, who enters is, and how the people inside it may conduct themselves. Anarchists do not agree that they have any sort of rightful ownership over these properties, so say their (often violent and brutal) control is in direct opposition to freedom. Even the most lenient anarchists, such as myself, stick with a strict occupancy-and-use vision of ownership, which would still disqualify the claims of capitalists and states as legitimate (if you dig deeper into what that idea means, which is outside the scope of your question). Some anarchists deny land ownership entirely. There are lots of flavors of us, but all of us agree that both the state and capitalists have no exclusive right to what they claim, so should not have exclusive control over it or the other people interacting with it.

It is also worth noting that anarchists are aware and consider the ways in which states and capitalists obtained and maintain their power over these properties, and how they are also in opposition to freedom. For example, capitalists and the state are infamous for taking over land and resources from populations that were already using it using state military/police powers and then selling its use back to the original inhabitants in the form of rented properties or wage labor. Capitalists will employ state police and military power to harm workers who attempt to unionize or strike or gain better conditions. For example, during the coal wars in central Appalachia where I’m from, the US government got involved and even dropped a bomb on strikers. Capitalists also use their wealth to influence the state, which enabled them to more easily abuse workers and damage the environment. To quote Parsons yet again, “Never be deceived that the rich will permit you to vote away their wealth.” States start wars in the name of resources and power, killing innocents globally. These are just a very, very few examples of the sort of nonsense state and capitalist agents get away with—all of it in opposition to freedom.

So that’s what we fight AGAINST—now I’ll talk about what we fight FOR. Let me start by saying not one of us believes in utopia. We recognize our ideal world will still be imperfect, as all visions will be—attempting to legislate away those imperfections will always fail and replace old problems with new ones. Anarchism is a set of guiding principles, a process more than a result: the process of always striving for liberation. There is no set, perfect anarchist society we all envision in unison. Communities could take many unique forms and still be anarchist.

I have explained that we oppose domination of one person over another—what we promote is cooperation and free association. Anarchists promote replacing hierarchical structures in society (governments and businesses) with horizontal ones; ones where people are meeting the needs of their community by cooperating and working together freely as equals, not as boss-bossed, ruler-ruled, or owner-owned. And there’s always the option to go live on your own somewhere, but humans are social and most would not choose that. Without a state, you are likely looking at smaller communities of people self-governing, utilizing democratic decision-making among all in the community who wished to be involved in any large-scale decision that affects multiple people. Decisions or projects that affected only you would be made entirely by you, or done entirely by you.

One thing some anarchists have often proposed is a committee system, which is comprised of all who wish to be involved in a community-wide decision, with democratically elected delegated to perform certain tasks. Delegates are instantly abolished if they act beyond what their initial task was. If communities are associating with each other, they too would need to operate democratically using a similar system on a larger scale. If you want a more specific idea of what something like this could potentially look like, you can read here. I’ll quote something from that source:

“The key difference between a statist or hierarchical system and an anarchist community is who wields power. In a parliamentary system, for example, people give power to a group of representatives to make decisions for them for a fixed period of time. Whether they carry out their promises is irrelevant as people cannot recall them till the next election. Power lies at the top and those at the base are expected to obey. Similarly, in the capitalist workplace, power is held by an unelected minority of bosses and managers at the top and the workers are expected to obey.”

Just know that this is ONE vision of how anarchism would work, and likely not all communities would operate this way.  Many anarchists aren’t too fond of this system—and that’s expected. We are not looking for a single top-down approach, and there are actually multiple different flavors of anarchism that approach these things a little differently. But we are all unified in a desire for freedom, and opposition to domination.

Anyway, I am trying to give the sparknotes on an ideology with a massive and rich history, described and even practiced in depth by people much smarter than me. For that reason, I am going to leave some links for reading that might flesh out some of what I’ve said, and if there are specific questions, please feel free to ask them. And my other anarchist followers, please clarify any unclear things I said, add your input, or give recommendations for reading! It benefits us all.

This page is nice because its lists LOTS of anarchist texts sorted by author

An Anarchist FAQ - MUCH more detailed than anything I could write

A Lifelong Anarchist by Lucy Parsons, since I quoted it

Anarchism and Other Essays by Emma Goldman, because I like her stuff

[southeastasianists]

With the National Council for Peace and Order (NCPO) slowly but gradually lifting restrictions on campaigning, scores of new political parties have stepped into the fray. Careful not to run afoul of the recently revised and tightened organic law on political parties, they are making sure their steps are in sync with the slow pace set by the junta. For over four years, Thais have patiently waited to cast their ballots, and parties are keen to stay qualified for the long-awaited game of musical chairs.

Among the new parties, two appear to represent the coming of hope, even for the impatient and the disillusioned—the Future Forward Party and the Commoners’ Party. Both cater to distinctive constituencies. Together, they present a sort of contradictory complementarity much needed in Thai politics.

(I note inconsistency in how English-language media spell the latter. While the Thai word samanchon is singular, independent media including Prachatai and The Isaan Record translate it as plural. By contrast, there is no consensus in mainstream media. Whereas Khaosod English uses the adjectival form—the Commoner Party—the Nation confusingly employs both the adjectival and plural forms. Here, I follow the usage of independent media outlets.)

Future Forward—whose future?

The Future Forward Party is led by a group of upper-middle and middle-class urbanites, scholars and activists, who previously played commentator roles from the periphery but appear now tired of second-hand democracy. Thanathorn Juangroongraungkit—a son of the Thai Summit family, which controls the biggest automobile company in Thailand—heads the party, now one of the most followed on social media. Future Forward presents itself as the third force, or a remedy to polarised politics.

Thanathorn is more than meets the eye. Despite his wealth, he has long been active in Thai progressive circles and is well known for his left-leaning ideals. Thanathorn’s politics crystallised during his period of student activism as the vice-president of Thammasat’s Student Union and the deputy-secretary of the Student Federation of Thailand. Regularly making rounds in Thai social media is a photo of Thanathorn caught between the police and the Assembly of the Poor, a front-page moment and a good caricature. In many ways, he represents the contradictions reshaping Thai contemporary politics.

The Future Forward Party is well positioned to tap into pro-democracy factions that shun Thaksin’s party line, including independent labour unions in metropolitan areas. He is aided by many progressive scholars and leftist activists including Piyabutr Saengkanokkul—an active member of Nitirat, a group of politically-critical legal scholars—and Sustarum Thammaboosadee, a committed advocate of the welfare state. Both are foreign-educated, young professors at Thammasat University. Thanathorn and his team have been well received even by mainstream media.

But Future Forward may only be a case of Thai urban, organised labour being left with the “lesser of two evils”: token representation. As the leftist scholar-in-exile Giles Ungpakorn comments, the Future Forward Party “is likely to be a party aimed at sections of the pro-democracy middle classes. It will prioritise the free-market and business interests while also claiming to support the poor in an abstract manner. Its leader, tycoon Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit, has stated that it will ‘protect capitalism for the benefit of the majority’. In the past, he has emphasised that business must make a profit before benefits for workers can be improved.”

Future Forward may offer a way out of military dictatorship, yet it is hard to imagine a set of coherent policies that is simultaneously laissez-faire and pro-labour, not to mention inclusive of meaningful power-sharing with the working class. Previously a lecturer at Thammasat myself, I share much of my background with the two scholars who support Thanathorn in moving the Future Forward. Nevertheless, as a labour advocate, I grapple with the contradictions between the party’s class interests and pro-labour claims.

The Commoners’ Party

In my view, the advent of the Commoners’ Party represents a more exciting, radical break with the status quo—one that has so far kept class privilege of the likes of Juangroongruangkit intact.

Contrary to the Future Forward’s elitist, think-tank style, the Commoners’ Party sets out to be governed by the working poor. Although some co-founders are from urban middle-class backgrounds, the party’s identity is shaped by shared concerns around the poor’s lack of power and the destructive impacts of uneven development in the Northeast—a region of origin for many activists.

Against the backdrop of hierarchical politics commonplace in Thailand, the Commoners’ Party has pledged to be truly bottom-up and build policies from the ground—an ideal I wholeheartedly support though follow with baited breath. Unlike Future Forward which centres on leaders’ charisma and grand ideas, the Commoners’ premise is to create a genuine platform for the voices of villagers, hitherto silenced or non-existent in parliamentarian politics. The party itself grew out of a grassroots movement that bears the same name comprising political activists and NGO workers from various right-based issues.

Despite state surveillance and restrictions on campaigning, the Commoners’ activists have been organising forums across the country to provide a platform for locals to voice concerns over various issues including communal rights and environmental justice. Early this year, the party led a group of protesters in marching over 450 kilometres to help shed light on neglected but crucial issues of food security and community control over natural resources. Most importantly, it may be the first time since the heyday of the 1970s student uprisings that a Thai political party has explicitly discussed social-democratic policies.

Having known the Commoners’ founders and some of its activist members myself, I cannot deny that the transition from a social movement to fully-fledged political party is full of contradictions: here comes to mind the image of a banner with an anarchist symbol that decorated the site of the party’s first general meeting in late September 2018. According to the Party’s elected chief Lertsak Kamkongsak, the activists have taken inspiration from a number of sources: Western-style green parties, eco-socialism, anarchism, European Pirate Parties, and the indigenous Zapatista group. The idea of creating a political party was entertained for years by a co-founder and the secretary-elect of the Commoners’ party, Kittichai Ngamchaipisit—a veteran peace activist and strategist who is personally drawn to Gandhi’s philosophy of non-violence and the Zapatistas’ style of direct democracy.

Soon after the Commoners’ first general meeting, the party was forced to face reality. It was struggling to meet the legal requirements of having a million-baht initial fund and five hundred members. Yet the Party has finally overcome the hurdles, having a first taste of what it’s like to play this electoral game.

The Commoners’ activists may be new to elections, but they are not to street politics and building grassroots movements. Lertsak has years of experience in organising with communities resisting extractive mining and dam projects. The trust bestowed on him testifies to the underlying issues important to his constituency: social inequality, economic exploitation, environmental degradation, and the marginalisation of the rural poor in the political process. In this sense, the Commoners’ Party embodies undercurrent ethno-regional and class indignations suppressed over several decades of uneven development.

These are, of course, crucial concerns shared also by red shirt supporters. But within the proxy war of rival elites, these issues have not only been unaddressed, but aggravated by competing populism.

A Commoners’ Future?

Despite my excitement and optimism, realistically the Commoners’ and Future Forward parties are and will be a minority in Thai politics. This realisation makes the idea of working together imperative. Yet according to Kittichai, regrettably irreconcilable differences between the Commoners’ and Future Forward foreclosed the prospect of merging the two.

I join other activists from the left who are suggesting that the two parties collaborate. That collaboration would need to take power differentials into serious consideration. What the Commoners stand for—the interests and livelihoods of their poor constituency—sit uneasily with the privileged positions of Future Forward’s supporters.

Given that their target constituencies would be mutually exclusive, the least the two parties could do is to endorse each other’s candidates. They could also make sure that their platforms do not compete, or cancel each other out. Apart from shared anti-coup sentiments, there are a variety of concrete issues they could jointly discuss ranging from downsizing Special Economic Zones, strengthening universal health care, advancing the idea of welfare state through progressive taxation, as well as land reforms and a living wage.

Both parties have their own strengths, which are variously oppositional and complementary: one pushes for change from above, the other from below. While Future Forward is well endowed with financial and social capital, as well as a well-versed network of scholars, the Commoners have deeper understanding of uneven development and how to work with the masses beyond the ballot.

[bombardthehq]

War as Paradox

by Youri Cormier

written 2016, read 01/04/19-??

A book which outlines “dialectical war theory”, examining Clausewitz and Hegel’s theories of war. In particular, there is a great deal of discussion about Clausewitz’ reading & the intellectual milieu he was contributing to, which makes it useful as an accompanient to On War itsef. The text is also much lighter. Our notes will probably be a lot less formal and systematic.

Introduction

Cormier addresses a number of criticisms of Clausewitz, as well as popular misrepresentations of him in the literature, in a way that echoes my own feelings so precisely that it gave me a feeling like doves being released into the air in my brain.

He promises to address the issue that Clausewitz theory creates ‘self fulfilling prophecies’ in the first chapter, and the question of wether or not Clausewitz is still relevant today in the era of terrorism and drones, but mainly answers the question of wether or not Clausewitz was influenced by Kant and Hegel; he says its obvious that he was, even though he doesnt mention them.

He frames Clausewitz as part of a history of thinkers that begun with Kant, includes him and Hegel, and emanates on to Marx, Engels, Kropotkin and Bakunin; what Kant applied to reason Hegel applied to the state, Clausewitz to war, and the revolutionaries to politics, sociology, economics...

Clausewitz concerns himself chiefly with strategy and tactics, specific questions about war, and has a theory of war itself, while Hegel has no perspective on strategy and is concerned almost entirely with the ethical dimension of war.

While both thinkers are dialectical, they are both dialectical in different ways, and Cormier says that their theories of war are not completely dialectical; Clausewitz uses dialectical analysis in his overall analysis of war - the dialectic between the ‘absolute’ and ‘real’ wars, for example - but does not see the things that he analyses in a dialectical way of themselves, while Hegel enters his discussion of war into a worldview that is entirely made up of dialectical processes however has no dialectical theory of war of his own.

Taken together the two theorists complete each other, however not perfectly; they have radically different perspectives on the ethical dimensions of war, which complicates a holistic ‘dialectical war theory���

Hegel treats war as right in and of itself and is an essential component of the survival of a people and is essential to maintain the state. Cormier uses two quotes from the Philosophy of Right: “Successful wars have checked domestic unrest and consolidated the power of the state at home” and “[...]corruption in nations would be the product of prolonged, let alone ‘perpetual’ peace”

Clausewitz, however, sees war as having no ethical dimension of its own, but entirely an instrument of political will, that “war is only part of political intercourse, therefore by no means an independent thing in itself.”

Cormier sees these two diverging ethical approaches to war as both manifesting in the revolutionary wars of the early 20th century; the Hegelian form with the anarchists, and the Clausewitzian with the marxists. (!!!!!!!!!)

How to Approach Claims that Hegel and Clausewitz Generate Self-Fulfilling Prophecies and Warmongering

The claims about Clausewitz are quite easily dismissed as distortions, having their origins in blatant misreadings by both his detractors and supporters.

We don’t need to cover this in too much detail but a few things to note:

In order to address some criticisms, Cormier discusses the role of the State in Clausewitz and Hegel, in order to countre claims that they saw war as only carried out between states, and not between ‘non state actors’.

He first of all talks about how Clausewitz did, in fact, address non state actors explicitly, and brings up “Small Wars”, the word he uses for insurgency conflicts.

On his concept of the state: in his era, where the state was in some ways only coming into being, in the wake of enormous revolutions such as the French Revolution, their concept of the state was not static or unchanging, but in flux, and which they had sort-of-utopian ideas about.

Clausewitz said that the nation “achieves independence and unity, only to disappear once again”

“Clausewitz’s notion of the state was built up on a classification of means and ends: a tool by which peoples achieve national and its cultural ends. It was not an end in itself.”

Cormier talks about how, while the king of Prussia had ceded territory to and allied himself to Napoleon, he joined the Russians and fought against them, but in doing so saw himself as acting on the political interests of Prussia and himself carrying out policy that was not coordinated with the state.

Cormier talks about how many non-state actors see themselves as ‘states in waiting’ and carry out policy.

Hegel regarded the state as  “a process that creates itself, asserts itself, renews itself”, and “the actuality of concrete freedom” - Hegel regards the state as an ethical system, more than anything else. He promises to return to this in a later chapter as its too complex to treat now.

He then addresses the self-fulfilling prophecy part, which again in the case of Clausewitz is based on distortion. One interesting distortion is the work of Ferdinand Foch, an architect of World War I, who seemed to intentionally misrepresent Clausewitz as a bloodthirsty warmonger and handmaiden to Napoleon, in order to present his own ideal of mechanized warfare.

Cormier says that dealing with claims that Hegel makes self-fulfilling prophecies about war is a bit more sticky, since Hegel did consider wars a historical necessity.

He says that Hegel views historical events as a spectator after the fact and only then declares them necessary, but that later interpreters utilized this to project it into the future and call certain things historically necessary, or as a kind of destiny; he refers here to Marx, and to marxists.

He concludes the chapter with this, that Hegel is only self-fulfilling when projected into the future, and thats Marx’s fault. This is, to me, a clear misinterpretation of Marx, as well as surely overstating Marx as an inheritor of Hegel, and I’m not sure that what he says was the fault of Marx cannot in fact be found in Hegel, but alas...

Perfection and Certainty in Metaphysics and War Theory

Cormier talks about how, prior to Clausewitz, military theory had focused on making itself into a ‘scientific’ disicpline, which could make precise predictions and uncover eternal truths about the world.

It therefore focused primarily on quantifiable data: geometric distances, manouvers, etc. The manouver was in fact the only consideration for theory. Following the theory was supposed to always produce victory. These are the ‘positive theories of war’

This seemed to be confirmed by Frederick the Great’s application of those theories in the Seven Years War, however it was suddenly disproven by the Napoleonic Wars where Napoleon’s enemies employed the theory and were defeated here, while Napoleon employed the theory and was defeated there - in particular, Napoleon took the Russian capital, but Russia did not surrender, and in the end won the war, which went against all positive theories of war.

Cormier says that their theories were true only in the context of wars between feudal european states, where wars were generally not worth too much expenditure of force, and that this was not true with the social upheaval of the French Revolution and the great distances and great effort that Napoleon’s nonprofessional army would commit.

It is these positive theories that Clausewitz directs extremely stiff criticism, dismissing them as pure theory and contrasting them with reality, with the diversity of war in relation to its poltical object, and to which he opposes his own dialectical methodology (without ever mentioning them explicitly - subtle!)

[Note: this is what Jomini gets pissed at him for, see here]

[autumnsidhe]

Answer all the things

D&D Ask Meme

ah fuck. i can’t believe you’ve done this.everything’s going under a read more b/c it’s gonna be long as all fuck

2. Your favorite character that someone else has played.ollie……….. little shit idiot i love him? he and james are both anarchist dumbass but in different ways. brothers in arms.

3. Your favorite side quest.oh christ. there’s no real particular side quests but my fave side plot in general is what i’ll summarise as “alora is a rat bastard.”

alora met a hot rich socialite guy who seemed really into her and she decided she was gonna play the long con on him b/c he might be useful

she and james both agreed to side w/ king clockwork, but when the king actually mentioned it alora gave james a Look™ and he was mad as fuck. he’s still kinda mad as fuck

she decided to be pals w/ a main antagonist (gluto) and didn’t tell us until days after it happened that he’d talked to her in his dreams

alora was told to not tell anyone abt the repugnant’s secret organisation. she immediately spilled the info to everyone

she was told to not mention the organisation’s meeting or anything that went on there. she immediately spilled the info to the motley and literally sent us a photo of the repugnant on his throne speaking to everyone

she was told to keep a specific person away from castle repugnant. she let him waltz right up to the castle w/ everyone else and seemed confused when they said he couldn’t go in

she broke into somewhere w/ gluto and then left him in a room full of very important documents b/c she somehow didn’t think taking him there to begin w/ wouldn’t backfire

the last thing james said to her was literally “i take it back, you’re a stupid shit idiot and i hate you”

4. Your current campaign.random sideplots get to go here this time! most of them are james or ollie b/c we interact the most w/ npcs

james and galant romance sideplot and the sheer amount of wild scenes that have happened as a result (the date, le fway showing up, addy’s dating advice, “ollie, you’re pretty ignorant”, “so you killed your boyfriend”)

ash coaches a baseball team

ollie tries to handle pink drugs, fails to provide any evidence that he’s not the cause

alora helps the repugnant, always immediately regrets it b/c he’s a little bastard man

the gang trying to figure out what’s going on w/ the repugnant’s amnesia

james accidentally making friends w/ a black spiral dancer and being heavily in denial abt why cylus probably got so attached to begin w/ (hint: it’s the anarchy and the horrid rebellious streak)

james nearly sides w/ the main antagonist b/c he’s got the right idea but his methods are fucked

ollie goes to fairy prison, makes friends w/ a vampire and some old sidhe, is currently in the middle of trying to break out

5. Favorite NPC.unfortunately it might be cylus? cylus is like 6 levels of batshit at any given moment and was introduced to us as a nameless dangerous prisoner that galant was holding for some sort of treaty? and james and addy were told to not listen to him for any reason and to not let him free. and of course james let him free. he shifted into a giant 9ft-ish tall war form and then james realised he was really in over his head. upside: he went back in his cell afterwards. downside: he got attached to james. also downside: james didn’t actually get warned that he was a dangerous war criminal until after all this went downthen cylus literally showed up in james’ dream to tell him a few things and warn him that he was planning to escape? and there was nothing james could do b/c “i heard it in a dream” isn’t exactly a solid claim esp when he doesn’t have any sort of future sight. and of course cylus broke outthen james ran into him in the dreaming and james was losing his mind the entire time b/c cylus is an absolute freak and james was stuck walking w/ him for like 2 hours. then like an hour after they parted ways james got flung into a ditch on the edge of town (in the real world) and cylus carried an unconscious james like a sack of potatoes into waffle house and just let him sleep on the table for a bit. then like 3 days later cylus broke into his apartment and made him breakfast.and then james got flung out into the middle of nowhere again for reasons and cylus was there and james had the choice of dealing w/ cylus or being horribly lost in the woods so he chose the first one. and he nearly got caught in the middle of a big werewolf fight that cylus orchestrated. and also nearly got caught in some extremely violent family drama.throughout all of this cylus is acting like he’s james’ best friend and last time they spoke cylus really wanted to do buddy cop stuff! they’re pals! totally! and james wants absolutely none of it but he can’t explode on him b/c he’s a skinny little twink and cylus could snap him like a twig w/ no effort

to summarise:

6. Favorite death (monster, player character, NPC, etc).we actually haven’t had many deaths! the only ones i can think of in game that aren’t random monsters were the old bastard and nor nan, which. were both interesting in their own ways, but nor nan’s was mostly tragic and i don’t wanna get feelsy so i’ll just use the old bastard here.to set the scene: we’re at a fancy party. ash and marike (an npc, he’s an unseelie lord and overall a hell of a time) are off on their own trying to catch chimerical creatures that stole their weapons. marike curbstomps one, meanwhile the other has climbed up onto a curtain rod. the place has really high ceilings. his solution? pick up ash and toss him at the creature. ollie and the old bastard (who owns the house) walk in just as this is happening, and the old bastard sees ash tear down the curtain rod for no damn reason. of course he demands answers. ash tries to bullshit a story abt an entire family of raccoons they were trying to chase outthen the old bastard gets shot in the head. ollie and marike are splattered w/ blood. he hits the ground, ash makes a joke abt “telling his wife the bad news”then he notices his wife is the one who just shot him

7. Your favorite downtime activity.the entire arc’s taken place over the course of 15 days in-game, including downtime. we haven’t had any specific downtime activities per say, but the best moment we’ve had during downtime was when ollie broke into james’ apartment and now he refuses to let ollie anywhere near his apartment complex

8. Your favorite fight/encounter.i’ll stick to generally hostile meetings for this since we’ve only a small handful of solid fights? but it’s either “james nearly dies” or “ollie is a good distraction”

to set the scene for the first one: the hospital chimerically burnt down, so the motley decided to investigate and sneaked in as janitors. james ended up alone down in the morgue after finding a body covered in chimerical burns getting wheeled down there. he checks it out, takes a couple photos on his phone. then the door opens.james starts cleaning and stuff, but it turns out the person who came in (gluto!) was also a changeling and very easily noticed the fact that he’s got really noticeable pointy ears in his fae mien. and of course he starts threatening james. and after he pulls out a massive scythe. james sends everyone an sos but they all get stuck in the elevator. so james pulls a gun in a fucking hospital. and he gets called on the bluff but before he can put it away, in bursts galantgalant starts kicking a bit of ass, and then gluto ripped the (already weak from the fire) chimerical ceiling down on top of them! galant did some shit to lift the rubble off them with little to no effort and james was kinda like “oh no he’s hot” for a second before galant kicked a bit more ass and gluto ran like hell!then he next night galant literally died for james (it’s okay, he got better) and confessed that james is his true love and just. man.

for the second one: there’s 3 assassins after galant. he fucked off to lovescreek in order to avoid them, but when ollie found him, one of the assassins had found him! so ollie joins the fray against this troll (who are like 8′ at the shortest), and after a short bit gluto joined in as well to distract ollie from the main fight! so what did ollie do? start loudly singing “i’ve got a lovely bunch of coconuts” for a chicanery bunk to turn galant invisible. and of course both assassins turned on him and he ended up having to run like hell but when he lost them galant reappeared and was like “well that was fun”

9. Your favorite thing about D&D tabletop RPGs.i’ll keep it real, i’ve disliked every dnd system i’ve experimented w/ and i’m not a fan of most fantasy so it’s unlikely i’ll every actually play a proper dnd game but god… tabletop stuff is just so much fun? mostly the story and the fact that joe is absolutely godly

10. Your favorite enemy and the enemy you hate the most.cylus may be my fav npc but my fav antagonist is definitely king clockwork? ic my very first encounter with him led into him and james talking about their beliefs and ideals for like 2 hours straight and when he was getting ready to leave james was ecstatic that he’d finally met someone who fully understood his mindset. then the bomb dropped that he was the boss of the other antagonists and james was hit w/ this utter horror. and then james considered siding w/ him for a long ass time before eventually trying to kill him to put a stop to everything. yeah. yeahmy fav enemy/antagonist is absolutely gluto b/c he’s creepy as shit. during anyone’s first encounter w/ him i was completely solo and it was horribly unsettling and i simultaneously love and despise him

11. How often do you play and how often would you ideally like to play?we meet once a week! what game we run varies but recently it’s been changeling every week since we’re still waiting on player characters to start hunter the reckoning lmao

12. Your in game inside jokes/memes/catchphrases and where they came from.we have a bunch of them but uhhhhh random ones off the top of my head

“it’s always sunny in coolville” b/c i realised early on that we were going to be up to a lot of dumb shenanigans and it was easy to make it’s always sunny title cards based on each session

#saveduke b/c there was a whole thing at one point where we had to keep him from getting kidnapped. spun off from that are #SaveDukeFromHimself, #SaveGalantFromJamesStupidity and #SaveDukeAgain?

“appearance 4, captivating” b/c dom said it regularly for multiple sessions until his character dirty danced with a hot guy at a party, after which he decided that alora was a lesbian

“does [insert art] let me throw fireballs?” b/c dom wanting to throw fireballs down the street is a running joke but also he unironically asked if primal 2 would let him throw fireballs

“james got norted” b/c he nearly joined the main antagonist, which devolved into “[insert random character] got norted” at the most random times

james and galant touching tips b/c at one point while they were casually talking ollie just started going 👉👈 in the background and james got really mad and flustered abt it so everyone started doing it

“ultra instinct ash” b/c he’s our shaggy and also has done like fuck all nothing productive in game so him going fucking super saiyan to kill the final boss is hilarious

“i got two hands!” b/c people regularly ask why ollie dual wields broadwords

#OllieOllieOxenFREE b/c ollie got himself sent to fairy jail

“i did [stupid thing], can i buy [half related skill]?” like “i attempted murder, can i get chronos 2?” or “i was an assassin in a past life, can i get melee 3?”

“people, let me tell you bout my best friend!” abt james and cylus b/c boy does james have bad taste in friends

14. Introduce any other parties you have played in or DM-ed.uhhh exalted is the only one i’ve been a part of that’s been solidly active, but we’ve got characters for scion for when 2e drops, and i’ve got characters set up for chaos reigns when joe starts the next arc b/c i didn’t wanna peter parker myself into the finale. i don’t remember the rest of the scion crew well enough but i love them

15. Do you have snacks during game times?we almost always grab food on the way there and eat before we properly start

16. Do you play online or in person? Which do you prefer?in person! it’s the only way i’ve ever done it but i’m 🙏 that maricopa gets running online b/c……….. vampire good………..

17. What are some house rules that your group has?the big house rule for changeling is “ run things fast and loose.” joe knows the characters well and what’s on their sheets so we don’t do too much dice rolling except for arts. joe also takes some artistic liberties w/ some things, mainly wayfare and the inanimae, b/c his main goal is to make a good story and he’s sure as fuck succeeding

18. Does your party keep any pets?do addy and duke count? they’re a white rabbit and a beagle. beyond that, addy’s got pet rabbits, and ollie might be feeding a stray cat

19. Do you or your party have any dice superstitions?not really. dom claims that dice rollers hate him but he also keeps using his dice roller rather than pulling out physical dice

20. How did you get into D&D? How long have you been playing?i got into tabletop years ago when harley introduced me to the dystopia rising larp and i decided to check out the tabletop version for more lore. the current tabletop system sucks but onyx path is handling 2e and i’m so hyped for it. at some point a bit later i played vampire the masquerade bloodlines, and it got me into the world of darkness and well. i still love it.as for how long i’ve been playing, uh. around a year i think? i forget when we started exalted the borderlands-ing. i’d been sitting in on the group for around a year before that, mostly getting a feel for things and also we were trying to figure out a good jumping in point for me and i wish i could’ve started earlier but it let me mesh w/ everyone a bit easier and also have an outsider’s viewpoint when it came to certain issues

21. Have you ever regretted something your character has done?oh absolutely, “i fucked up” is the semi-catchphrase for james for a reason. he theoretically has common sense b/c i usually say “this is gonna be stupid/bad” either ic or ooc before i do some shit and well. yeah it doesn’t usually go well but we have fun

23. Do you use premade modules or original campaigns?i think the only thing not original we’ve run since i moved up is strange aeons and maybe a coc scenario? everything else has been original campaigns

24. How much planning/preparation do you do for a game?not too much, really. i sometimes plan out a little of what i’m going to do, but half the time i never actually have the chance b/c stuff moves in a different direction than i was expecting. however i also write the summaries of the shit we’ve gotten up to every session so there’s that

25. What have your players done that you never could have planned for?i’m not a dm but i’m answering this for joe b/c he flat-out admitted that he couldn’t predict what was going to happen in at least half of changeling b/c we’re an unpredictable mess but everything’s come together to make a really interesting finale

30. Are your players diplomatic or murder hobos?answering this one too even tho it’s still a dm question b/c the players themselves are half diplomatic (me, mal, joe depending on game) and half murder hobos (fredy, dom). dom’s been going more diplomatic w/ alora but also she’s so bad at it and it’s wonderful

31. What is your favorite class? Favorite race?classes aren’t a thing in changeling but out of the kiths ouuuuuuuugh i love sidhe a lot. like they’re honestly cool as hell and i fucking love the house lore? i’ll also do houses b/c fuck it, my fav house is beaumayn b/c they have no chill and every bit of house lore they have is brutal as hell

32. What role do you like to play the most? (Tank/healer/etc?)just looking at my trends of characters i’ve got currently (re)built, i have:- the face (james, rex, val)- support (henri, caoimhe, river kinda?)- the antisocial son of a bitch (nomi, neil)- “i’m going to wreck anything you point me at” (hound, oliver, elliot but not by his own choice)- pure chaos (nora, glitch mage)gemma is kinda hard to put into any category b/c she’s babey?

33. How do you write your backstory, or do you even write a backstory?it depends on the character? some characters don’t have backstories (caoimhe, nora), some i’ve fleshed out heavily (james). it’s usually assembled from a bunch of random snippets written over the course of however long. some of it’s heavily thought out, other parts are just kinda arbitrary. i also tend to run some more important chunks past joe or mal just to see how they feel? james being from house gwydion was originally arbitrary and wasn’t really gonna matter (joe himself said it would just be a bit of flavour) then he figured out how to fold it into plot and i’m thriving b/c le fway is wild

34. Do you tend pick weapons/spells for being useful or for flavor?flavour, though use is also a bonus? artswise james currently has naming/chronos/contract, which are all useful in their own ways but also reflect his past lives / him as a person

35. How much roleplay do you like to do?yes. if i’m not able to embrace the character i’m playing is it really that fun? is it really? no b/c when that happens to this group we get the dumbed down version of chaos reigns and i go fucking batshit b/c of the fact that combat takes way too long

[timeforabathblog]

6. Updates 2021-22

A few updates on things I've been up to in the last year or so...

In June 2021, I wrote a post for the Journal of the History of Ideas blog, critically examining colonial bathing-related ephemera – particularly postcards like the one above – and how it might be analysed in relation to wider ideas of the bathing place in the colonial imagination: https://jhiblog.org/2021/06/14/enclosed-against-crocodiles-the-bathing-place-in-the-colonial-imagination/

In September 2021, I had the pleasure of reviewing Sun Young Park's book Ideals of the Body: Architecture, Urbanism, and Hygiene in Postrevolutionary Paris for H-Net.org. The book includes fascinating material on the inception and physical culture of Parisian swimming barges, as well as semi-fantastical designs for urban pools, realised and unrealised. (Image source).

Sticking with the French theme, in February of this year I read an original translation from a section of Histoire d'un Ruisseau (History of a Stream) by the geographer and anarchist Élisée Reclus, at an event at Harbour Cycles in South London organised by Hermione Wilkinson and Huxley Ogilvy. Might try to publish a longer version at some point.....

Then in March I presented a talk to the Oxford Civic Society on 'River Bathing in Oxford – Past, Present and Future' alongside local historian Richard Mills and activist Eleanor Blyth. Eleanor's beautiful self-published book of Oxford swims (each with a pub at the end of it) is available online here: https://blythpublishing.com/. (Image: John Whessell, The Bathing Place (c. 1830)).

Finally, I'm excited to have been awarded six months of financial support, via Birkbeck, from the Wellcome Foundation's Institutional Strategic Support Fund. This will go towards organising an exhibition of wood engravings of/about Parson's Pleasure by the artist Duncan Montgomery with an accompanying catalogue-essay, as well as me hunkering down to write a book proposal on the basis of my PhD. Duncan already has engravings from the series (among others) for sale on his website and takes commissions for any occasion: https://duncanmontgomery.co.uk/work

[fatehbaz]

The current fear of China’s rising tech industry closely evokes the villainous depiction of Japan in ‘70s/’80s popular magazines and cyberpunk media; the tonally consistent tradition of American xenophobia against East Asia

As a sort of hobby interest, I do a lot of reading about Shenzhen, Chongqing, and Shanghai - three mega-cities and critical economic powerhouses that the Chinese establishment has used since the ‘90s as, essentially, experiments in rapid urban development with the basic intent to create hubs for computer technology industries to rival Silicon Valley. These three cities were essentially minor cities with rural agricultural hinterlands in the ‘80s, but today rank among the Top 20 most populous cities on Earth, with truly massive GDP’s, booming tech industries, thousands of start-up operations, and sophisticated architecture and transportation infrastructure. These cities - especially Shenzhen - have succeeded in rivaling the Bay Area.

There’s a lot at play - politically and socially - in how these projects were achieved (and especially fascinating is how Chongqing’s success is closely related with the city’s adoption in recent years of retro Marxist-Leninist communitarian ideals and programs). But today, I wanted to talk instead about American xenophobia and how these rapidly-growing tech hubs terrify Americans.

This week, I was watching a short-ish small-budget documentary on YouTube, which specifically explores how Shenzhen has become the “Silicon Valley of China.” Shenzhen alone hosts over 12 million people (greater than all of Chicago-land), but the city is physically contiguous with a greater urban area of 45 million people (three times metro Los Angeles-Anaheim) surpassing Tokyo and making it the most populous urban area on Earth; Shenzhen’s GDP is higher than Hong Kong, which happens to be just across a narrow strait from Shenzhen. Anyway, this YouTube documentary focused a bit on how the low-income residents of the otherwise highly-gentrified Shenzhen have become famous in Asia for their extremely passionate entrepreneurial spirit and penchant for re-purposing used and discarded tech parts to create homemade off-brand computer tech to sell at street markets. The narration also mentions how these tech wizards - and the more wealthy tech start-up workers - are able to establish themselves partially because they are not prosecuted for (re-)appropriating American inventions. Many jealous American tech workers allege that Shenzhen start-ups are “infringing on the intellectual property rights” and patents of American corporations.

And let me tell you, these (what I assume must be) young white American guys in the comment section are livid. Just, there is a stunning amount of comments that look like “Shenzhen only has a high GDP because they’re STEALING American intellectual property” or “yea, maybe they’re good engineers, but it was GENIUS AMERICAN MEN who came-up with the code” and “Americans did the hard part, the Chinese are just good at mass-production and cheap knock-offs.”

That last accusation is important: the concession that “China is good at mass production and efficiency” but “Americans are the real innovators who made it possible.”

“It’s not fair that China gets to profit off of technology that American heroes like Mr. Zuckerberg-Bezos McPeter-Thiel came-up with first!”

And these same tropes - “East Asians are frighteningly efficient, but Americans are smarter” - should sound very routine to anyone familiar with American xenophobia in the ‘70s and ‘80s.

So, this is all to say that I was reminded of a nice passage from one of my all-time favorite pieces of cultural commentary, which is Nicola Nixon’s classic “Cyberpunk: Preparing the Ground for Revolution or Keeping the Boys Satisfied?” Nixon’s 1992 article discusses how all the hype that cyberpunk as a literary genre was receiving for being woke and “revolutionary” was not totally justified, at least for parts of the genre; a lot of cyberpunk at the time celebrated the Ayn Rand-style American, individualistic “cowboy-ism” of its male protagonists and included a lot of half-assed women characters. These shallow tropes were especially emphasized in the parts of the genre made for mainstream, popular consumption. Nixon, in the article, also clearly traces how radical feminist utopian science fiction of the 1970s paved the way for the kind of social wokefulness that cyberpunk would later claim.

Nixon’s article takes a momentary aside to address American (and Canadian) anti-Japanese xenophobia during the ‘70s and ‘80s, and how popular cyberpunk stories pitted American exceptionalism and rugged individualism against Japanese corporations. Nixon even suggests that Japanese congolmerates were subtextually conflated with “femininity” to make them even more threatening.

Here’s the fun passage:

Indeed the Yakuza is the paradigm for all the other Japanese megacorporations which appear regularly in Gibson’s texts: a collective construct which conflates the tight familial bonds of the Italian-American mafia with the equally tight employer-employee bonds of the frighteningly efficient Japanese industries. It is the latter which formed the subject of endless documentaries and business-magazine articles throughout the ’80s because their corporate practice presented the most substantial threat to American-style capitalism America had yet experienced.12

American xenophobia and isolationism, particularly with regard to the Japanese scientific and economic invasion, manifested itself in the media through such scare tactics as Andy Rooney’s piece on 60 Minutes (Feb. 5, 1989), which portentously identified various historic American monuments as Japanese owned! And 48 Hours presented a piece called "America for Sale" (Dec. 29, 1988), in which various reporters, including Dan Rather, emphasized American objections to Japanese ownership of American real estate and industry. Amorphous Japanese collectives clearly posed a threat to the land of the free entrepreneurial spirit. This is surely the fear underlying the (defensive?) mockery and ridicule attending representations of Japanese tourists, traveling in tightly-knit groups, sporting extremely expensive, high-tech photographic equipment. If Canada as a whole did not reflect precisely the same degree of anti-Japanese paranoia being played out in America, British Columbia, Gibson’s home, betrayed more conflict about Japanese investment than most parts of the country. In the early and mid-’80s, in the midst, that is, of British Columbian Premier William Bennett’s open-door policy to Pacific Rim investment, reactions to Japanese tourists and potential investors were mixed: their infusion of capital into the flagging B.C. economy was indeed welcomed, and yet their actual ownership of luxury hotels, real estate, and various natural-resource companies (the forestry industry in particular) was both attacked and feared as being, ironically, merely a reenactment of past American practice.

If we examine Gibson’s texts within the context of such conflicting interests, we see the degree to which he deliberately avoids any form of simplistic anti-Japanese paranoia or its attendant racism and ethnocentrism. And yet Gibson’s Japanese conglomerates, in their collective and familial practice, nevertheless form the implicit antagonistic counterpoint to the individualist heroes. The bad guys in Gibson are, after all, the megacorporations—Ono Sendai, Hosaka, Sanyo, Hitachi, Fuji Electric. The good guys are the anarchic, individualistic, and entrepreneurial American heroes: independent mercenaries and "corporation extraction experts" like Turner, console cowboys like Case, Bobby Newmark, Gentry, Tick, and the crew at the Gentleman Loser who jack in and out of the global computer matrix with unparalleled mastery. In Williams’ Angel Station (1989), Bossrider Ubu traverses the galaxy, roping in black holes. In Sterling’s Islands in the Net, American Jonathan Gresham, the self-styled "post-industrial tribal anarchist" (388), rides his "iron camel" through the "bad and wild" African Sahara—one of the few places free of the global Net—and eventually saves the hapless but earnest Laura Webster. The cowboys in Gibson, Williams, and Sterling are heroes who represent, as Williams suggests in Hardwired, the "last free Americans, on the last high road" (10). It seems telling that the American icon of the cowboy, realized so strongly in Reaganite cowboyism, the quintessence of the maverick reactionary, should form the central heroic iconography in cyberpunk.

Cyberpunk’s fascination with and energetic figuration of technology represents the American cowboy as simultaneously embattled and empowered. In ’80s America the Japanese megacorporations did dominate the technological market, but the cowboy’s freedom and ingenuity allow him to compete purely on the level of mastery. The terms of such a competition—Japanese pragmatism and mass production versus American innovation and ingenuity —seem precisely analogous to those of a familiar American consolatory fiction: that free enterprise and privately funded research and development in science and technology have produced in America the most important technological innovations of the 20th century, innovations which the Japanese have simply taken, pirated, and mass produced, thus undercutting the very American market which encouraged their discovery and making it financially difficult for the neophyte technological wizards to get corporate funding. In Interview’s special "Future" issue (1988), almost adjacent to Victoria Hamburg’s interview with Gibson, there appeared an article titled "Made in Japan," which confirmed for the American readership that the Japanese did not "initiat[e] new ideas" (Natsume, 32) and reassured it about the benign nature of the new products coming out of Japan: micro-thin televisions, special low-water-consumption washing machines, camcorders with RAM cards, auto-translation machines—non-essential but nice, unthreatening appliances.13 Computer and technological innovation would still come from American silicon valleys, would still be, by implication, "Made in America." In Gibson’s novels the console cowboys use expensive Hosaka and Ono Sendai cyberspace decks, but such mass-produced technology is always customized and enhanced, its performance and capabilities augmented by the cowboys’ more inventive, finer ingenuity.

In effect, the exceptionally talented, very masculine hero of cyberpunk, with specially modified (Americanized) Japanese equipment, can beat the Japanese at their own game, pitting his powerful individualism against the collective, domesticated, feminized, and therefore impenetrable and almost unassailable Japanese "family" corporations. After all, in the world of the microchip, small is potentially powerful.

From:

Nicola Nixon. “Cyberpunk: Preparing the Ground for Revolution or Keeping the Boys Satisfied?” 1992 - Science Fiction Studies. https://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/57/nixon57art.htm

This right here:

The terms of such a competition—Japanese pragmatism and mass production versus American innovation and ingenuity —seem precisely analogous to those of a familiar American consolatory fiction: that free enterprise and privately funded research and development in science and technology have produced in America the most important technological innovations of the 20th century, innovations which the Japanese have simply taken, pirated, and mass produced, thus undercutting the very American market which encouraged their discovery and making it financially difficult for the neophyte technological wizards to get corporate funding. 

In this passage, you could replace mentions of the Japan of 1992 with the China of 2018 instead, and you’d be describing exactly the comments of and contextualizing proposed by American xenophobes criticizing current Chinese tech development and mass production.

[rotationalsymmetry]

Hey there.

In my usual fashion I didn’t read through everything that struck me as “so wrong my brain can’t take it,” so I’m responding mostly to the top couple posts.

“Anarchism” doesn’t have to be “there will some day be a revolution and then we will create a better society.” It can be, and in practice often is, “let’s do something right now to create alternatives to hierarchy-based systems, and give people ways to survive under the current conditions.”

(In practice, most anarchists I know are at least as much against corporations and capitalism as government. Anarchism is against nation-states, but technically it is about opposition to coercive hierarchies, and hierarchies come in many forms — including religious hierarchies, education, the military, etc.)

So what do anarchists do? Form worker-owned cooperatives that run on consensus decision-making. Run Food Not Bombs chapters that feed people now and Homes Not Jails chapters that turn unoccupied buildings into free housing now. Run community gardens and participate in skill shares and time banks. In my experience these things are the sorts of things that most anarchists do most of the time.

And figure out how to do protests on a massive scale that is based on affinity groups working together rather than a central organizing team telling everyone else what to do.

And support groups that aren’t explicitly anarchist but work for causes we care about, workers’ rights and racial justice and so on. Providing food, childcare, prison support, picket line support, etc. (Seriously, I cannot overemphasize how important it is for organizing meetings to provide childcare — without it, an awful lot of women get excluded. Especially relevant for white people including white men who want to support racial justice organizations — white allies should be aiming for support roles, not leadership roles. But I digress.)

We don’t all have to agree on what the ideal perfect society would look like, to work for a better world right now. I’ve organized anti-Iraq War protests with communists — we don’t have the same vision of the ideal society, but we know that the US bombing Iraq isn’t getting anyone closer to it. I’ve done a lot of work with liberals and with progressives, because we might not share the same vision of the future or the same understanding of what’s wrong right now, but we agree on enough things to have working partnerships.

And the thing is? When you’re running a Food Not Bombs cookhouse or a worker owned cooperative or organizing a protest (or running around distributing elections material because of that one ballot measure that will really mess things up if it passes — this weird idea that tumblr anarchists have that anarchists never do electoral politics is beyond me), you get to actually test your ideas and see what works. So you don’t have to just trust to untested theory, you get to try it out in the real world. With real people. On a scale that you can actually wrap your mind around.

Which, if your theory sucks, will get you straightened out on that better than any number of internet arguments.

If your anarchy doesn’t include the protection of disabled ppls rights then I don’t fucking want it. If it puts poor people struggling to survive on the front lines because they have no other choice then I don’t fucking want it. Be aware that without safety nets in place for those most at risk you are telling people to pull themselves up by their bootstraps just like capitalists. You can’t destroy a system without something to fall back on so get into mutual aid! Don’t be an armchair anarchist! Create the foundation for a better world before you rip out the broken foundation we have now. Be angry, but put it to good use.