HeavenlyPossum

HeavenlyPossum, 1 month ago to random

So the World Central Kitchen convoy a) cleared its route with the IDF beforehand, b) traveled on an approved route, and c) departed at an approved time, so d) the IDF knew exactly who it was killing when it struck the convoy three (3) times.

It was so obviously deliberate, and so deliberately cruel—not just to murder these people, but to terrorize other aid workers into abandoning the Palestinians to be starved to death. To prove the IDF’s impunity and reach, and to compel the IDF’s defenders into apologizing for yet another unforgivable atrocity.

HeavenlyPossum, 1 month ago to random

“How would we do this or that under anarchism?”

Consensually, through voluntary agreement, or by yourself, without coercive interference.

I’m sure that sounds like a cop-out to a lot of people, but it’s based on a principle of humility: we can’t possibly know what solutions people will pursue, negotiate, and adapt to the ever-evolving problems we face in the world.

Some anarchists have invested a lot of work in figuring out how we might organize ourselves if free—federations of councils and the like—and that work is valuable. Some people might adopt some of those solutions some of the time. But it’s not for me or anyone else to prejudge or insist upon any particular solution.

We’ll do it together, in free cooperation, by talking to each other, persuading each other, inducing each other, or by leaving each other alone.

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HeavenlyPossum, 1 month ago to random

I will never understand the audacity of showing up in someone’s mentions to be a condescending asshole and then being genuinely surprised when that someone mutes or blocks said asshole.

“Who could have anticipated these consequences of my own shitty actions???”

HeavenlyPossum, 1 month ago to random

If you look at, say, an American city, with

• its physical infrastructure built for cars, and

• its cops who will arrest people for using the public space called “the street” without first purchasing a car, and

• its compulsory wage labor,

and conclude that people collectively chose a carbon economy that’s destroying the planet, you’re missing the point.

HeavenlyPossum, 1 month ago to random

If we didn’t have police, then who would checks notes murder kidnapped children?

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/apr/01/california-police-video-shooting-15-year-old-girl-savannah-graziano

HeavenlyPossum, 2 months ago to random

One of every 21 adults in the UK is a landlord.

Britons who privately rent spend just under a third of their income supporting these landlords each year. Nearly a hundred billion pounds a year.

So a Briton who privately rents spends just under four months laboring each year just to support these landlords.

All that work, all that time, all that commuting…just to generate revenue to pay rent.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/mar/19/end-of-landlords-surprisingly-simple-solution-to-uk-housing-crisis

HeavenlyPossum, 2 months ago to random

The hierarchies of state and capital are two of the most intrusive and omnipresent in our lives, and they are very much institutionalized.

By that I mean that the state and capital are both institutions. They have codified and legible rules; they present themselves in society with visible and regularly recognizable symbols; they behave in predictable ways and produce predictable outcomes.

When you see a cop, you know exactly what that cop represents and who that cop works for, and you also have a pretty good sense of how that cop will behave in any given circumstance.

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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.

HeavenlyPossum, 2 months ago to random

LOL. Lmao, even.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-bond-ruling-hush-money-trial-news-b2518383.html

HeavenlyPossum, 2 months ago to random

I take such immense satisfaction from composting.

From the earth, to the earth.

HeavenlyPossum, 2 months ago to random

Not that long ago, I posted that I although I am an atheist, I am personally uncomfortable trying to push atheism on anyone. It doesn’t bother me if other people have found ideas that help get them through a life that is often confusing, scary, and hard.

Now, this triggered a bunch of atheism bros, who tried to convince me that this was a grave mistake and that society desperately needs more atheism bros to save people from their pathetically comforting delusions.

I blocked a bunch of them, because they lived up to everything that made me uncomfortable about proselytizing atheism and didn’t respect boundaries.

I don’t regret that at all, but something about that experience has been niggling at my brain.

HeavenlyPossum, 2 months ago to random

My favorite kind of reply guy is wildly unhinged aggression just right out of the gate.

https://mastodon.social/@gmsizemore/112147698748291142

HeavenlyPossum, 2 months ago to random

“I would be most happy to be proven wrong, so feel free to go ahead and do so.”

The Debate Me bros are out in force and they are so fucking exhausting

HeavenlyPossum, 2 months ago to random

Just encountered someone whose objections to anarchism include “Usenet needed more coercion because it was taken over by assholes.”

If you’re the kind of person who believes people should be hurt by the state to ensure you have an enjoyable experience in any conceivable forum, I just don’t have anything left to say to you.

HeavenlyPossum, 2 months ago to random

The idea of human beings as rational utility-maximizing particles with insatiable hedonic desires is very much the product of an ideological project to justify capitalism as “natural” and has virtually no relationship to how actual human beings live but a lot of people have genuinely internalized it.

Trying to derive “human nature” by observing people under capitalist modernity is like looking at a bored, depressed wolf obsessively pacing a circle in a tiny zoo enclosure and concluding that this is “wolf nature.”

HeavenlyPossum, 2 months ago to random

I realize that it’s fun and popular to mock white hippies who construct a pastiche of “tribalism” or white people who larp as imaginary Vikings or whatever, but I also can’t blame them for being hungry for some sense of cultural belonging.

The creation of whiteness as the hegemonic identity at the top of the white supremacy pyramid necessarily entailed homogenizing lots of different kinds of people and alienating them from their cultural roots. The cost of being assigned a bland, default whiteness was the loss of specificity, continuity, and meaningful community.

This is hardly the top priority problem when it comes to dealing with white supremacy but that doesn’t mean it’s not real. I just try to cut these people some slack.

(Please note that I’m not talking about the ones who have gone Nazi. I just mean the ones who have cobbled together some hodgepodge of signifiers in an attempt to rebuild something clearly missing in their lives.)

HeavenlyPossum, 2 months ago to random

“If we lived in a truly voluntary society, one without coercion, how would we do [some work that is currently performed under duress]?”

We’d figure out how to do it voluntarily together. Or the people who really valued it would do it themselves, or genuinely incentivize someone else to do it voluntarily.

Or we just wouldn’t do it at all, and discover that it wasn’t actually necessary or sufficiently desirable to be worth doing at all.

HeavenlyPossum, 2 months ago to random

The “the universe is really a computer simulation by a more advanced civilization” is a fun thought experiment and cool sci-fi theme but I really loathe that some people have adopted it wholesale and that loathing was confirmed when Musk adopted it.

All these rationalist nerds have just invented space Catholicism while imagining themselves to be the cleverest of boys.

HeavenlyPossum, 2 months ago to random

Virtually every state that has ever existed has failed. There are vastly more states that once were that are no longer. They were conquered, split up, overthrown, or collapsed on themselves.

There is no Holy Roman Empire. No United Arab Republic. No Confederate States of America. No Avar Khaganate. No Yugoslavia or Cisalpine Republic or Fatimid Caliphate.

Your state will probably fail someday too. Remember that the next time someone criticizes anarchism on the grounds that it would be difficult to sustain.

All human endeavors are difficult to sustain. Embrace change.

HeavenlyPossum, 2 months ago to random

Having watched Benioff and Weiss smear themselves with shit the moment they went past Martin’s books, and then later admit they had no idea what they were doing, didn’t understand their characters, and didn’t like their source material, you’d have to pay me to watch anything by them ever again.

HeavenlyPossum, 2 months ago to random

A human being is a sustained, complex chemical reaction that makes art.

HeavenlyPossum, 2 months ago to random

I saw someone on a “collapse” forum ask:

“What do you think will be the first domino to fall?”

As in, collapse hasn’t started yet, but it will soon, so we should be on the look out.

Meanwhile, the state has utterly, totally disintegrated in places like Sudan and Haiti, which just happen to be around the same latitude, the part of the world that’s projected to become physically uninhabitable from temperature increases alone within this century.

All throughout that region there are coups, insurgencies, terrorism. Burkina Faso had back-to-back coups in 2023. The state barely exists in Central African Republic or South Sudan. Huge parts of Mexico are ruled by cartels and millions of Central Americans are fleeing north.

The first domino? The first?? It fell a while ago. The weakest states—the ones that were already environmentally marginal and devastated by colonialism—in the hottest zone have already collapsed. They’re gone. They’re not really coming back, are they? But they won’t be the last.

HeavenlyPossum, 2 months ago to random

If you've ever seen a map depicting Paleolithic (ie, old stone age) cultural areas, you might have noted how vast these areas were. Some of them cover the equivalent of modern countries, while others cover basically all of Europe and on into Asia.

I had always more-or-less written these off as exaggerations based on a paucity of data. Archeologists depended for a long time on those pieces of material culture that can persist for thousands of years, and that has mostly meant stone and sometimes bone artifacts. As a result, it seemed like it was an easy over-simplification based on similarities between those stone tools. Sure, people in what is now Spain and what is now Ukraine might have been using similarly shaped stone tools, but did they really belong to the same cultural group? The same society?

Maybe!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurignacian

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HeavenlyPossum, 2 months ago to random

Firms hate work-from-home, despite savings and productivity gains, because the point of the office is the centralization of surveillance and control.

Capitalism isn’t about controlling people to make lots of tchotchkes for our ruling class to enjoy. Capitalism is about making lots of tchotchkes to make lots of workers for our ruling class to enjoy.

HeavenlyPossum, 2 months ago to random

When instagram first started, the explore page was filled with just whatever people were posting at that moment.

So if you stayed up really late in the US, you’d start getting posts from people in Indonesia as they woke up and started posting.

I really miss original instagram and really fucking hate how it was ruined.