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why have the skies of america become a circus

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I think a lot of the people you'd associate with the "start a community garden! support local businesses! make zines!" posturing and who are at least nominally sympathetic to communism conceptualize of organizing as a series, or more specifically, a collection of broadly "good" actions that are possible in the short, short-medium term. And it is worth pointing out that this does not come from nowhere, it's a more extreme version of the mental shortcut essentially all organizers end up taking. Oftentimes, when you're working within a party or organization, there are a set of actions and activities that become routine, justified implicitly by their own frequency. This isn't necessarily a problem, but it can be one if left unacknowledged and unchallenged. Along the lines of this post, effective organizing is practical, yes, but based on a careful collective analysis of the external, political context and the internal, organizational realities, if you allow me the semi-correct dualism. We don't do things because we can and they're good, we do them because it's the best course of action to further the medium and long term political agenda of raising consciousness towards challenging the bourgeois' power.

So what I believe happens to those people I mentioned at the beginning of the post is that this fetishizing of the usual activities is so extreme there isn't even an actual concrete analysis of concrete reality at some point in the past to point to, and things are done because they appear to be good in some intuitive sense. For example, you might look at the Black Panthers' free school meals program and attempt to imitate it as closely as possible, instead of actually learning that the school meals program was correctly judged to be something that could really demonstrate the possibility and power of classist worker's organizations, to further their goal of eventually contesting the US' bourgeoisie, in the context of the situation of the US's schooling of poorer children. Much like reading theory, the point is not to learn about anecdotal events, but seeing how conclusions where reached that lead to actual victories, large and small.

Especially for those with the ailment of horizontalism, you'll encounter plenty of orgs mostly making post-hoc and hasty justifications for doing things for which there simply wasn't very much thought put into. Once again continuing on the ideas of that post I linked earlier, this happens because those same people do not have actual programs that can guide their own independent activity, instead substituting it with a long list of things they're against and concepts they abstractly support.

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To my mind, reclaiming a slur is a loud reminder to others that the society we live in created this slur. When I call myself a tranny in front of my cis friend, it's a reminder "Hey, I have to navigate the world as a Tranny. This is something that people call me. This is how some people think of me." And it should make them slightly uncomfortable to hear it! At least, that's how I use it.

And there's two things I take from this; for one, it would be entirely within another transfem's right to say "that slur is also aimed at me, please don't say that." Because using a reclaimed slur is a reminder to everyone around you of your oppression, and that can have splash damage!

The other thing is, well... sometimes, it's not aimed at you. If you are an afab person and you looooooove Dr Frank N Furter like... that character's role is to make the audience witness every harmful stereotype of a transfeminine person, a vain, unsightly sexual predator who will trick men into fucking him. If you are afab and/or a man... that's just not something you had to navigate the same way a tma person did. If you want to "reclaim" him, you are reminding every tma person around you of their oppression, and not your own.

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New York City, 1970s

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they're canceling low-income housing here to build a cop city FUCK rhode island man

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Not sure if you're still into signalis. But do u ever think about Mynas and go :<

What if you woke up one day and your entire body was heavy machinery? The other girls are mechanical too, but you'd hardly know - they tap around on the floors gracefully, interfacing with society as anyone else would. They fit through doors. Not you, you're industrial equipment. Your soft, gentle face pokes out between pressure-reinforced polycarbonate plates, and a curious Eule asks why you never take off your suit. You are fine, though. You are strong. You are stable. When you die, they'll make another. It's no issue. You love teddy bears.

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yo ali abunimah's out

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i know she ate a leek

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i don't know if people know this but the idea that AGAB is useful in medical contexts is actually actively dangerous

one of my friends has CAIS. they were assigned female and have a prostate. they have been denied prostate exams multiple times on the basis of "being assigned female" despite insisting that they had valid concerns about symptoms that aligned with prostate cancer. guess what happened when they finally got an exam? they ended up having prostate cancer

it fortunately is now in complete remission, which is why they're comfortable with me talking about it, but you see the issue here? biology is never as simple as assigned sex, by judging the care someone needs by their proximity to maleness or femaleness any mixed or otherwise "abnormal" sex characteristics they have are completely ignored

it doesn't just affect intersex people either, you're throwing trans people under the bus as well. transitioning does change your sex characteristics, trans people should have access to medical care that is catered to their body and not to their assigned sex

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this Tom Homan guy who is acting as Trump's border czar is a straight up demonic individual. a dye in the wool fascist and a 21st century nazi if i've ever seen one. only an institution as dangerous, corrupt, violent and hateful as the Republican party would put an awful, HATEFUL man like this in charge of the country's immigration policy. i mean genuinely. they even gave him an award!

errr... okay. maybe this is just out of context or something.

ah lads... okay, okay, hold on. have we considered that maybe Barack Obama just didn't know? maybe this guy didn't have a track record of being a crazy, "law and order" type his entire career and just recently went crazy.

fuck. well. maybe he has a 25-year track record in the agency of being a demon, but let's be real, Obama had no way to know he'd be on board with all of this mass deportation stuff. Homan clearly played it very close to the chest that he was on board with Trump's craziness.

see!!!!!!! that's a man who doesn't want to make Donald Trump mad, even though he won't be the Republican nominee for another 3 months after this article came out and virtually no one in the country thought he was actually going to win. you have to play your cards carefully.

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I'm going to do a cursory reading and screenshot what I think are the most alarming parts in a bit.

AS ALWAYS, I am not a journalist, a legal scholar, or anything like that. I'm an average trans woman with an unrelated science background trying to parse this

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Liberals who think the rules and regulations will save us from fascism constantly receive L’s and yet keep going. Bruh this is the county in which the Trail of Tears was determined to be unconstitutional by the Supreme Court and all Andrew Jackson had to say was “they’ve made their decision, now let’s see them enforce it.”

Andrew Jackson and Donald Trump understand American power far more than their liberal detractors. Liberals can’t do more than appeal to the rules, when the ruling class wrote those rules not for itself but for their subjects. It is military force that determines political outcomes, not some words in a book. Andrew Jackson essentially taunted the Supreme Court, stating their decisions are invalid because they don’t have the military on their side.

There’s a reason Trump admires Jackson. Trump isn’t an aberration, he’s the realization of America’s already existing racist, nationalist and antidemocratic tendencies. He’s not a deviation from American history, he’s part of a continuous line of tyrants.