HeavenlyPossum

HeavenlyPossum, 6 months ago to random

It’s often the case that critics of anarchism will demand to know how we might obtain public goods without the state, because their entire frame of reference for public goods is in the context of state monopolies.

And I might reply that all sorts of public goods predate the state by thousands of years or more. Neolithic peoples were building trackway roads and monumental architecture and all kinds of neat things.

And critics of anarchism will often gleefully seize upon this as if it presents some clever gotcha. They think this means that the best we can hope to achieve without the state is a Neolithic-level of technology and cooperation.

And I find that response to be…so immensely sad. They see a dead-end; I see incredible achievements with only the barest of technologies and available knowledge, and can only wonder at the marvels we’d be able to achieve together now.

HeavenlyPossum, 2 months ago to random

The funniest thing about Donald Trump is that he is so routinely honest in public—“I will be a dictator,” “there will be violence if I lose”—and yet the majority of people are so concerned about decorum, so terrified of appearing to overreact, that the American political system just plods along as if he hadn’t said what he said.

HeavenlyPossum, 4 months ago to random

I have a hard time taking seriously people who warn me that the next US presidential election will decide between democracy and fascism and then spend most of their time yelling at anonymous strangers online about not voting.

Why are you not desperately trying to get out the vote in swing states? Or stockpiling ammo and batteries for your insurrectionary cell?

HeavenlyPossum, 8 months ago (edited 8 months ago) to random

When I was a kid in the 80s and 90s, I watched Star Trek: The Next Generation. I soaked up the vibes of a high-tech, utopian future. I internalized the trajectory we were on was good, that we had reached the End of History. There might be a few bumps on the road, but the direction was inevitable and the destination was inexorable.

It turns out that the fastest a human being has ever traveled was 39,897 kilometers per hour. That was the crew of the Apollo 10 mission returning to earth. That happened on 26 May, 1969.

Fifty-four years ago. We peaked more than half a century ago.

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HeavenlyPossum, 3 months ago to random

When I was a teen, I was aggressively anti-theist, imagining myself quite clever for demonstrating how silly religious beliefs are.

But life is fucking hard and I learned not to begrudge anyone any solution they’ve come up with to make life a little more comprehensible to them.

I don’t share anyone’s religious beliefs, but it’s not as if I’ve figured out how to run my own life successfully. I shouldn’t be in the business of telling other people how or how not to handle the world.

HeavenlyPossum, 11 months ago to random

There was a stretch when Elon Musk took over twitter and started charging for blue checks (lmao) and some of his sycophants started talking about “Veblen goods.”

A Veblen good is something for which demand increases as price increases, in contact to the neoclassical orthodoxy that demand decreases axiomatically with price.

Veblen goods are things that rich people buy to signal their wealth and status. Jewelry, fancy watches, yachts, Ivy League degrees. Things that cost many thousands or millions of dollars.

The idea that an $8 verification on twitter would ever be a status symbol for the rich was fucking ludicrous.

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HeavenlyPossum, 4 months ago to random

“The low expected turnout in the upcoming elections reflects a popular rejection of the…political system, which is suffering from a legitimacy crisis and the absence of real opposition forces to vie with the parties in power…”

We have no problem identifying low voter turnout as a consequence of political illegitimacy. People decline to vote because they recognize that voting will not produce meaningful change, because it’s not worth it and because they don’t want to participate in a corrupt system…

…as long as we’re talking about countries other than the US. When US voters withhold their participation, they’re almost certainly going to hear about how they personally want fascism to win. Haven’t you heard that this is The Most Important Election in Our Lifetime? All systemic analysis goes out the window and all we can talk about is personal failure.

https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/iraqi-political-systems-legitimacy-problem-low-expected-turnout-provincial

HeavenlyPossum, 9 months ago to random

Children are people. They are people who often have different needs and abilities than the hegemonic model of what a person is supposed to be.

When people act as if the presence of children in a social space is a problem, they’re letting you know what they generally think about people with different needs and abilities—including the disabled, the ill, and the elderly.

There is no liberation without youth liberation.

HeavenlyPossum, 7 months ago to random

In their book “The Dawn of Everything,” David Graeber and David Wengrow provide multiple accounts by early European settler colonists of the indigenous societies they encountered in the woodlands of northeastern North America.

Over and over, these Europeans noted that these societies were well and truly stateless, lacking rulers, laws, courts, police, prisons, or anything like what they were used to in Europe.

They quote one Jesuit, writing in 1644 about the Wendat:

“I do not believe that there is any people on earth freer than they, and less able to allow the subjection of their wills to any power whatever – so much so that Fathers here have no control over their children, or Captains over their subjects, or the Laws of the country over any of them, except in so far as each is pleased to submit to them. There is no punishment which is inflicted on the guilty, and no criminal who is not sure that his life and property are in no danger…”

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HeavenlyPossum, 10 months ago to random

A journalist recently noticed something strange about the New York City housing market. During the peak of the COVID crisis in NYC, the city lost close to seven percent of its population as people either died or moved away.

The real estate vacancy rate was close to twenty-five percent.

Since then, according to an array of parties with considerable interest in rents, the population of NYC has rebounded. As a result, housing is once again scarce and rents have soared.

Except…there’s no actual indication that the city’s population has actually rebounded, and certainly not by enough to explain soaring rental prices. After all, the city’s population had already started to decline before 2020.

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https://www.curbed.com/2023/01/nyc-real-estate-covid-more-apartments-higher-rent.html

HeavenlyPossum, 9 months ago to climate

Someone popped into my mentions yesterday and tried to argue that we can and should respond to the climate catastrophe by changing our consumption patterns—reducing, reusing, and recycling; carpooling; buying from artisans rather than big firms; etc.

Undoubtedly, many of us could improve the way we buy and use stuff and thereby nibble away at the margins of the climate problem. But no, we are not going to solve problems like “sequential heat waves that kill at least tens of thousands of people every summer” by recycling our glass bottles.

What I really want to talk about, though, is the idea that our pattern of purchases and use is somehow a neutral and organic expression of our preferences that we can just adjust on a whim. It’s not.

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#ClimateChange #ClimateEmergency #ClimateCrisis #ClimateCatastrophe

HeavenlyPossum, 10 months ago to random

45,000 years ago, a Neanderthal man experienced a crushing blow to the head that left him partially paralyzed for life, but his bones healed and he lived into his 30s or 40s, something only conceivably possible with the help of his community.

45,000 years ago.

But let’s pretend that 45,000 years later, we “can’t afford” universal healthcare.

https://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/human-fossils/fossils/shanidar-1

HeavenlyPossum, 6 months ago to random

The firm is one of the foundational myths of capitalism. We are trained to believe that the firm—hierarchical, exclusively owned, wage-paying and profit-taking—is a transhistorical phenomenon, a natural and self-evident way of organizing cooperative behavior.

The story goes something like this: a very smart person has an idea, or a very thrifty person has saved capital. That person then hires other people for wages in order to produce some good or service to sell in the market. This person is the owner; the owner owns the whole firm, setting all the rules and issuing the instructions including all of its assets, and collects all of the revenues. They belong to the owner, so obviously that we don’t need to even question it. Workers get compensated for their contribution via wages, a smaller but guaranteed payment now in lieu of a share of larger but riskier profits later.

So the story goes.

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HeavenlyPossum, 10 months ago to random

We’re doing the medieval peasant discourse again. We’re doing it!

Ok. Whenever we talk about “feudalism” or “the Middle Ages” or “medieval” we’re generalizing about millions of people in diverse communities and circumstances that spanned centuries. I’m necessarily going to be making huge generalizations about past societies that paper over important distinctions.

That said, we can still interrogate ways in which a medieval European peasant might have experienced life in ways that weren’t as bad as we popularly imagine them to have been, or might even have been better than comparable experiences people today have.

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HeavenlyPossum, 9 months ago to random

Three things jump out at me from news stories like this:

• The US government has been involved in providing children as essentially slave labor.

• No amount of “we’ve conquered poverty!” cheerleading from outlets like Our World in Data can paper over the catastrophic failure of “capitalist progress” that child labor represents.

• Capitalists would absolutely enslave you and your children if they could, and we know this because they literally enslave children when they can get away with it.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna96480

HeavenlyPossum, 7 months ago to random

Everything about the Andreessen “manifesto” that’s doing the rounds is awful, but the worst thing about it is that it is boring. Andreessen just repackaged the capitalist status quo, of which he is most decidedly a member of the ruling class, as a series of “revolutionary” affirmations.

This is the Live Laugh Love of the capitalist boyboss.

HeavenlyPossum, 7 months ago to random

A very, very common question I’ve seen when discussing anarchism goes something like this:

“Once people are free of state violence and hierarchy, how can they just stop some bad actor from taking over?”

The assumption is that people who are free from coercive hierarchies are powerless to act in their own self defense, alone or in cooperation with each other.

(The question is usually accompanied by some invocation of the dreaded “war lord” whom the questioner assumes will inevitably overrun a nonstate or non-hierarchical community.)

So, I thought I would take a crack at answering this as comprehensively as I can!

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HeavenlyPossum, 9 months ago to random

I was thinking to myself, “when will the effects of climate change get so bad that they provoke revolution” but then it occurred to me: they already did. Just in the wrong direction.

Syrians fled a civil war driven by the worst drought in a thousand years and Europe responded with a wave of reactionary fascism.

Central Americans fled rising temperatures that are killing agricultural workers and the U.S. responded with a wave of reactionary fascism.

Russia just happens to be in a war for control of some of the world’s best farmland.

Sudan is in the middle of a civil war and Niger just had its umpteenth coup.

Reactionaries are already at war with us over climate change. It’s only going to get worse as the world gets hotter.

HeavenlyPossum, 3 months ago to random

Religious beliefs don’t make people do bad things. They don’t make people do good things either.

Beliefs generally don’t make people do anything at all. That is, beliefs are not really causal to behavior. People tend to act like the people around them, the people they associate with and can observe (in person or virtually). We adopt beliefs primarily as ex post facto justifications for why we acted the way we did. They make it possible for us to live with our actions, but they don’t cause our actions.

Culture? Ideology? Religion? Not particularly useful indicators of how someone will behave.

HeavenlyPossum, 7 months ago to random

ProPublica just came out with another amazing piece of journalism, this one on the efforts by the capitalist firm Philips Respironics to hide the harms caused by its products.

Philips makes CPAP ventilator machines designed to be worn while asleep, creating positive air pressure to help people with sleep apnea. Back in 2010, Philips added a foam to its CPAP machines to reduce rattling that kept users awake at night. The foam Philips chose degrades, releasing toxic carcinogens directly into the mouths, throats, and lungs of users.

Philips knew about this right away. It spent years hiding reports that it was legally obligated to share with US governmental regulators. It waited over a decade to issue a recall. Thousands of people are sick; hundreds have died.

Go ahead and read the whole thing, if you have the stomach for it. It’s a typically excellent piece of investigative reporting by ProPublica:

https://www.propublica.org/article/philips-kept-warnings-about-dangerous-cpaps-secret-profits-soared

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HeavenlyPossum, 10 months ago to random

Workers without physical capital*—tools, factories, etc—build physical capital. Capital without workers is dead matter.

Capital ownership does not contribute anything to the production of value. It is purely parasitic on labor.

HeavenlyPossum, 7 months ago to random

Folks, the trolley problem is a thought experiment, not the real world. We don’t live in a Saw movie franchise dilemma where we have to trade one life for another. Killing Israeli kids won’t save Palestinian kids and killing Palestinian kids won’t save Israeli kids.

We know this because people have been killing Israeli and Palestinian kids for decades and they’re still not safe.

HeavenlyPossum, 10 months ago to random

I don’t know how many times I have to say this but

“There are aspects of past societies that are better than modern society and we should be free to adopt them”

is not the same as

“The past was absolutely better than the present is and we should adopt past lifestyles wholesale.”

HeavenlyPossum, 9 months ago to random

Capitalism must always grow. It can never stop.

Capitalists must always seek to maximize differential profits—they have to collect more profits than their competitors.

Because you can reinvest those profits in buying up more revenue generating assets, you can expand your business and grab more market share. Or, like when Microsoft bought Nokia to grab the patents Nokia held, you can invest in blocking your competitors from expanding.

If your share of the market falls so far that you can’t make payroll or pay your creditors, you go out of business. Your capital is seized and sold off, and you become just another worker, subject to the whims and commands of capital owners.

So capital owners in competitive markets must always try to grow at a rate faster than their competitors. If they stop, if they take a break, if the global ecosystem collapses, then so does capitalism.

HeavenlyPossum, 2 months ago to random

I remember being pretty young and asking my parents—is this it? We go to school every day and then we get a job and go to work every day and this is our lives, forever? Just living each day according to someone else’s schedule, at someone else’s command? This is life?

And they were pretty flummoxed. Yeah, they said, this is life. What did you expect? This is what you do and then you die.

These are the same people who showed my Koyaanisqatsi when I was like six and encouraged me to internalize its message that capitalist modernity is catastrophically, irrevocably broken and unsustainable.

And I just think…a lot of people hold pretty good beliefs in the abstract but it doesn’t occur to them to live as if they were actually true.