"Long COVID is the faulty, load-bearing beam in the rickety pandemic denial superstructure. Were the public to grasp how common and how severe it is, the entire post-pandemic facade would come crumbling down."
“This article is not merely an upsetting look at an individual’s victim-blaming mindset about her husband’s indefinite exclusion from public spaces. It is a piece of propaganda intended to further the perception that demands for COVID mitigation are unreasonable complaints, rather than critical activism for basic public health infrastructure.”
@violetmadder@RD4Anarchy Some people also get super mad if you say “Biden does more to promote unionization” or “Obama’s recovery plan gave money to the banks, Biden’s recovery plan gave more money directly to poor people”
Also the old one that Biden was in favor of gay marriage before Obama was
@RD4Anarchy@compost For those of us who are kind of thick in the head-
Are you talking about amending the “soil” of a society/citizenry with the shredded & slightly decomposed remnants of previous philosophies/ways of living, to be processed by the metaphorical bacteria (& other microflora/fauna) of the societal systems the you suggest?
@Gorfram@RD4Anarchy never thought to compare society to the soil, but it is an interesting idea.
To me society has become anaerobic, a lot of us have a hard time breathing simply because there are too many bad bacteria out there. If we want to bring more balance, we can't make changes that would apply to all. As individuals, we have to wipe out our negativity and search for grace.
@HeavenlyPossum in Aug. 2022 and wish I could link to it in reply. Thankfully I did archive it and now I'm re-posting it here with HP's agreement. I hope it is helpful to someone!]
The other day someone argued to a mutual that self-ownership is a “virtually universal intensely strong intuition” and I thought that was an odd claim.
I had never even encountered the concept until I joined Twitter and had it shouted at me by a variety of propertarians. It would never have occurred to me otherwise to think of my self, my personhood, in terms of property and ownership.
It honestly feels obscene to reduce my sense as an autonomous individual to the status of property, and supremely alienated. I own a rake. I own a potato. I don’t own myself, because I’m not property. I’m a person.
Taking a look at google’s n-gram, we find that “self-ownership” isn’t a particularly old or popular phrase in the English corpus, remaining extremely rare even as it has become more common in the years since the Reagan-Thatcher neoliberal revolution.
@HeavenlyPossum@rubixhelix@RD4Anarchy@LucyStag It reminds of the split I've seen in fans of the science fiction trope of transhumanism: those who see it as the freedom of the fully protean self, and those who see it as a consequence of the idea of the body as property and therefore alienable.
If your body is alienated from you than what is left of you?
Walter Block is either brave or foolish enough to admit that self-ownership permits self-sale, but most ancaps I’ve encountered will twist themselves into incredible knots to try to prove that literally all property but this very one kind allows for sale.
It was about as tedious as I expected it to be, but I deliberately chose to assume good faith until they started aggressively lying about what I had said.
I’m still not convinced this person isn’t just a sock puppet account for one of the other trolls I have blocked. The alternative is, allegedly, that screenshots of my roots are circulating on facebook and one of them inspired this person to join mastodon two days ago. I am skeptical!
I'm beginning to think that some people who make ignorant comments about kolektiva and its users are doing so based purely on their subjective impression of the word "kolektiva".
I enjoy being on Kolektiva, but I’ve started thinking about creating at least one backup/mirror account on another instance.
Not because there is anything wrong with Kolektiva, but because having so many of us on here together makes it easier for people to defederate from or block an explicitly anarchist instance and completely tune out anarchist voices.
On the other hand, the people who block kolektiva are probably not going to be receptive anyway. If an instance decides to de-federate us that's different, but I was encouraged by many of the replies in that thread where that 🤡 Ohio Rob was all proud of blocking kolektiva. Even some who also didn't really like what we have to say, nevertheless didn't see reason to de-federate, and even came to kolektiva's defense in that regard (as well as pointing out that Rob was being ridiculous).
China, USSR and Houthi apologist tells me I should get my "head checked" then immediately blocks me because a huge horde of bullet trains doesn't look to me like a dream come true.
It looks like a dystopian nightmare, that's just my honest reaction 🤷♂️
He’s like a reverse conspiracy theorist. “Hey guys, here’s this poorly constructed plan based on faulty reasoning and inadequate data that we should implement to fix all our problems.”
I was asked in a private message about my use of the term "tankie", and what "campist" and "ancap" mean. I thought I'd answer publicly in case it's helpful to anyone else, and so others can chime in to correct, clarify or enhance.
When I say tankie I refer to those who identify as leftists but are authoritarian; those who would use the violence and coercion of state to implement their idea of communism or socialism. Fans and apologists of so-called communist or socialist states like the USSR, China, Cuba, Vietnam, Venezuela, etc. Those who identify as communist but believe in state and the idea of a vanguard party (those who think they know better telling the rest of us what to do).
Campists, aka "anti-imperialists" or multipolarists, are supporters and apologists for horrible regimes and dictators that happen to oppose the US (in their eyes anyway). They have a cartoonish view of the world where the US is the only villain worth opposing and enemies of this enemy are their friends. They imagine that most other states have no agency; they are all either pawns of the US or they are heroes of resistance. They will apologize for the most atrocious actors like Putin, Assad, N. Korea, Iran, Hamas, Houthis, etc.
Ancap is short for anarcho-capitalist, which is an utterly absurd and incoherent position. Ancaps claim to be anarchist because they are against state, but they believe in private property and capitalism and think these are good things that can somehow exist without state (they cannot). They all seem to want to be leaders of little feudal kingdoms of their own. They imagine themselves as factory owners and everyone will be willing to work for them on a strictly voluntary basis. Short version: most of their incoherence comes from a ridiculously inadequate understanding of what capitalism actually is in the real world as opposed to their cartoonish idea of it.
For the long version, here is a detailed and historical deep dive into the subject: https://c4ss.org/content/56712
@RD4Anarchy
Good piece! I am of the opinion that the "tankie" designation has become too flabby, not because I'm worried about hurting their feelings but because it can obfuscate the specific dangers of the different types it tends to generalize. The campist problem is very serious, a terminal cancer on the non-anarchist left, and imo we particularly need to continue to spread the news on that tendency
Many people bring up this "inequality" thing, but it never "clicked" for him, he says...
People who think like that give me the absolute heebie jeebies.
I mean, I was done with him after he asked me three goddamn times if money votes-- I can't even figure out WTF gotcha he thinks he's trapping me in with that one, but he's very proud of himself. Thing is he'll run in circles forever and never learn.
The persistent undercurrent with these smug Randian jerks is this hideous attitude of, "well it's not our fault consumers/voters are stupid, if suckers want things that aren't good for them they deserve what they get, now congratulate the people smart enough to profit off of exploiting them" and "everyone is a selfish jerk, life is just gonna suck for those who aren't good at it, and the people who ARE good at it naturally earn the right to rule" which just boils down to the same old, might-makes-right fascist bullshit.
Then they dress it up with pretty talk of progress and how the standard of living has improved oh so much, as if most of us aren't about to die horribly over the next hundred years. They say capitalism only works if it improves the lives of everyone making the transactions-- so beautiful! So mutually beneficial! Tra la la!
...Slavery is immensely profitable. The only lives that matter in those transactions are those of the masters.
But there's no slavery anymore, see, it's all voluntary.
Reminds me of how the IDF has the balls to call it a "voluntary" evacuation when people run away from bombs. Voluntary.
These people don't understand consent. Only coercion. They don't believe there IS any such thing as contentment or satisfaction or altruism, because they've never felt it. "There is no such thing as enough".
FWIW - in the UK, "libertarianism "now has largely the same meaning as it does in the US.
VERY ROUGHLY, up until maybe 2005 (? maybe earlier?) I would have been able to say (in the UK) that I was a libertarian, and it be understood that I was anti-government in the sense that I hated their interference with people's personal lives:
Some examples, but not limited to, Clause 28 (the anti-LGBT laws) or the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 (the "repetitive beats" law)
It wouldn't have implied that I was against refugees, the NHS, unemployment benefits, or any of the stuff that it implies now.
I gave up on calling myself a libertarian some time ago, so as not to confuse people on my principles, and just went with anarchist, even though that in itself causes some issues. Frankly, I'd prefer people think I'm putting bricks through Starbucks' windows than think that I'm against disability benefits.
Hello hello 😊 Long time, but following our conversation, I do have a question after reading the book. What's the take on the tragedy of the commons in anarchism? Is it all based on voluntary "good behavior" and community-based? Or is there something a bit special to address this? Thanks :)
The “tragedy of the commons” was popularized by Garrett Hardin, an ecologist who had no experience in commons management. He was a white supremacist who advocated for privatization on the grounds that non-white people were too incompetent to successfully manage common resources.
In other words, the “tragedy of the commons” is a racist myth that was enthusiastically embraced by the capital class to justify privatization—a process that actually involved enormous amounts of violence and theft.
People successfully manage common resources all the time, and have for thousands of years, out of self-interest. Can’t recommend enough Elinor Ostrom’s work on this.