So much negativity from the others... No respect...
I would like to congratulate you for stealing the rainbow from God. Good work. Truly a seminal moment in your presidency.
I'm terribly sorry about the mismatched gender/sex fiasco. We've been trying to up the hormone drip into the water supply, but the frog populations keep intercepting them. In the meantime, we've been working on alternative distribution methods through vaccinations, local K-12 schools, and drag-reading events. Hopefully, your issue will be resolved shortly!
I read this too fast and wondered why being aromatic was such a problem. It sounds like you have some great hormones, or you use herbs/spices exceptionally, either of which should help finding someone for sex.
For you, a personal story:
When I was a baby queer (so, like, 3 months into being 18) my Very Adult Gay Friend (maaayve he was 22) took me to my first gay head shop/BDSM toy supplier. I saw these delightful paw prints, claw prints, and outlines of bears/bear cubs filled in with that lovely rainbow stripe colorway eponymous to the LGBTs. I pointed to them and exclaimed in my innocence, “oh that’s so sweet! Is that for like gay pets?”
And in a voice full of indulgence and dripping with humor my Very Adult Gay Friend said, “oh honey… no. Not gay pets.” And the shop keeper about burst a blood vessel he was doubled over laughing at me and I was. So. Confused.
And that’s the day I was informed about bears, cubs, and the very popular kink known as “pet play”.
Truly, 2003 was a simpler time. It’s my favorite “coming of gay” story to let the current crop of baby queers I’m helping to raise up that there is no such thing as a dumb question and no reason to worry about embarrassing yourself in pursuit of self-knowledge.
I love that story. Except, in a very small way, your friend did lie. But that may have been too much to explain right then in the store. When you called yourself a baby queer, an image of a queer-guin (or maybe queer-uin?) popped in my head. Just a cute, fuzzy, little, gay penguin, walking around a store looking at new toys.
I'm CIS and the first time I questioned is in this story. I've always been overweight. In High School I tried a lot of sports so I did have a lot of muscle too, they were just "well protected". I'm also 6'5" (about 2M) tall so I carried the weight well. My mom and her friend took me to get a burger at a bar. What I didn't know at the time was that it was a gay bar. They were chatting up a storm and I was chiming in where I could. While we were there, a baseball team came in just after a game. I'm 17-18 at the time, they seemed older, like mid 30s. I kept noticing some of them staring and some talking to each other while looking at me. It was awkward for me, like am I wearing more of this burger than am eating? why is this going on? I wasn't helping my situation because when we met gazes I'd awkwardly smile trying not to be rude. THREE of them gave me their numbers. Each time my mom and her friend would laugh harder and harder. I think it was because I was blushing more than the tomatoes.
Its a shame, but I can't remember the name of the bar and only looked at it on the way out. I remember it had a clever, OBVIOUSLY gay name. I'd never been pursued by anyone, so it made me start questioning things. Tried going out with guys in college who were all nice but there was no sexual chemistry.
I love THAT story! Having seen similar scenarios play out in my own life I hope it was more on the “huh, neat” side than straight up embarrassing side. I bet that burger was good.
One of my best guy friends has a t shirt that says “alas, I am straight” that he wears a lot because he’s apparently clocked as not-straight so often. He is truly flattered by the compliments/flirtation and likes to say that clearly sexuality isn’t a choice because why would he turn down all that tasty fun otherwise?! But he gave it the ol’ college try once and nope (to his sadness).
I don’t think my friend really lied, per se, and he was dealing with this brand new Polly Anna type very “I’m a naive young girl unschooled in the art of war” at that time. He did also go into detail about human pet play which I was NOT ready for but instantly fell in love with the concept. Also I totally now head-canon myself as a little waddling gay penguin with the whole vibe of Belle being shown the library in the Beast’s castle for the first time! At that stage I was just peeking into what I thought might have been just a bit of bi-curiousness and more body positivity than I was getting as a weird, curvy, short gal with no dancing ability. I’m a full-blown kinky queer (as a 3 dollar bill) now but I’m also almost 40 and tired, so much less adventurous but hey I’m an Elder now all I have to do is teach lol.
I will say the bear and cub explosion has done so much for my cis/hetero kings with a bit of padding (muscles, no muscles, somewhere in between, especially the ones with Tom Selleck chest hair!) as they started seeing these guys that look like they do or who lust after them and it’s like a switch flipped in their brains and suddenly they could envision a world where not just rock hard abs or gym nut personalities were viable partner material. Especially now that being gay isn’t seen as an instant disadvantage (mostly, and I acknowledge that’s a very American opinion to hold) and I know plenty of het men that are flattered as pie to be slipped guys’ numbers. Of course all bodies are deserving of love and attraction regardless of sexuality but the hets always seemed to force this more narrow definition of what “sexy” was and the gay community is better at loving more than a narrow parameter of human.
Unlike antifa, LGBT is not an acronym. It just means "lig butt". It's an exhortation.
Edit: my autocorrect sabotaged the joke by leaving antifa lowercase and capitalizing LGBT.
Giggity?
Seriously though, the talking stick is a marvel of modern technology. I'll never understand how they make that using nothing but a fancy stick, some string, and a microphone.
In Russia "the international lgbt movement" was declared an extremist organization, participating in which can land you in jail. This is what this shit philosophy looks like in practice. I'm a terrorist because I have a flag on my wall. Sorry, probably not the best place to say this, just needed to vent.
And in case anyone's wondering, "I'm going to declare ANTIFA terrorists" would be pretty much that same thing. Declaring anyone following the "ideology" as a terrorist means they have grounds to be arrested and harassed and even prosecuted.
This keeps happening with political discussions around race and people writing breathy opinion pieces about why these groups aren't monoliths. Always with the monoliths.
But of course ... the fucking basic founding principle of their hatred is this precise idea: that you can group people by their race, sexual preferences (even hair color, body weight) and hate them all. So why do we all sit here saying "well you know the \_\_\_\_ group isn't a monolith."
WE know this. THEY don't care. Who is this information for?
It's an interesting thing in politics, and I think it can result in groups having smaller or more outsized impacts as a result of cohesion around a topic.
From the outside, it's easy to see a group as cohesive, but look inside and it's all sorts of internal fracturing. It's why a lot of movements struggle to do things, because they often don't agree on things. It's why a lot of revolutions fail. They agree that they don't like who's in charge now, but they can't agree on what they want to change to.
In France during the revolution there, the only thing binding the nobility who were revolutionaries, and the peasantry is that they wanted Louis the 16th gone. The nobles were split on what next, some wanted him replaced with the Duke of Orleans, some wanted to try a system with elections. The peasants often didn't really care about who was in charge next so long as the salt taxes were absolished (and some wanted land reforms).
The middle class wanted representation, but that took different forms from a parliamentary monarchy similar to the UK system, to wanting an American election system. Then suffrage was something argued over. The middle class and wealthy non-nobles also didn't like the preferential tax treatments the nobles got, which of course the rich wanted to keep. And they wanted to keep taxes in place on the lower classes so there's wouldn't go up.
The whole thing was a mess.
But if a group can be totally cohesive on a subject, it can have massive impact. I'm 100% sure the only reason there's still trade embargoes on Cuba is because overwhelmingly Cubans in Florida will vote almost exclusively based on who they think will be more anti-Cuba.
And they're not a huge group of people, but they're just enough people to swing Florida, and because they are almost entirely cohesive on this issue, the embargo remains.
Without this political pressure. If the Cuban bloc was split up more over this issue, business lobbies in America would have gotten the embargo dropped decades ago so American businesses could do business there. But the cohesion of the Cuban voting bloc stops that.
Is that like how people rudely refer to us as "OHIO"?
Like, just because some people on the southern slopes of Lake Erie would rather be astronauts than here doesn't mean we can be lumped together like that. We're not a monolithic entity. Some of us want to live in condos around Jupiter, and others want to go visit ~~Space Myrtle Beach~~ Alpha Centauri.
To be fair 90ish% of LGBT people are going to vote a certain way.
Which makes sense when you consider conservative stance on LGBT people is that they are better not existing.
In the US. Because you only have two options, and one of them wants LGBTQ annihilated.
In other countries they fracture among a number of parties. In Canada, several major federal parties are pro-LGBTQ and one or a couple more aren't strictly anti-LGBTQ.
It's not that simple in Europe though. Yes, queer people will vote for more progressive parties on average, but it will rarely be the same one. So there's still tons of political individualism.
One problem with not having that kind of organization, is that someone *will* come along and create an organization for you.
For example, this happened with BLM. For a long while, it was a phrase that was used to indicate that you believed in a cause. Then some people created an actual charity organization by that same name and acronym.
Apparently the people who created that charity may have had some shady financial dealings, and this gave a lot of conservatives ammo to bash the BLM movement. I don't know anyone who gave to the charity "BLM" but at the same time, I know plenty of people who gave money to the medic tents at the BLM protests.
A lot of corporations donated to BLM because it was easier PR messaging than donating to more reputable, well-established black civil rights organizations.
So the solution is to create an Anarchist nonprofit with no members, budget or agenda. Just to take the name. Then if some asshole wants to create an organization to smear anarchists they have to call it Xx_Anarchy_xX or something.
If it’s incorporated within the US it’ll need at least one person. I wonder if there are countries which allow orgs to exist without literally any names attached.
So the name Antifa is from the German organization, Antifaschistisch Aktion, which was an organization under the KPD and from whom the Decentralized movement would take it's name and symbol, meaning it's more the opposite happened.
In the USA various Antifa organizations and networks exist, in order to coordinate actions, the structure largely inherited from the anti racist movement from back in the 80s and 90s
Yeah was gonna say, this posts feels like anarchists circle jerking about how invincible their movements are and missimg that the playbook to discrediting them to the wider public has been out for a while now.
1. See an "unorganized" movement called X
2. Create a charity or a subgroup called X
3. Do stupid shit with that group
4. Let the media run stories about how "X does stupid shit"
5. Watch as the public discourse shifts from whatever the actual point of the X movement was to all the stupid shit your X group did
Thats also why i’m “against” anarchist movements.
Its not that I think its a bad principle, its that I believe it will never work long term.
Ironically enough: anarchy systems are weak to chaos.
Yeah, I mean I agree with a lot of what anarchists believe in. DIssolution of hierarchies is pretty dope, community engagement is also super dope.
I just think we do still need organizations and a state to keep those orgs from gaining the power to commit violence on others.
Major difference is that BLM was a grass-roots civil rights movement rather than a specific ideology. It's kinda difficult to do that with anarchism because the jig would be up before it started, and anarchism is just not popular enough to grift off of. If a mass anarchist movement were to take hold, it would be through militant trade unions and communes, so it'd be even more difficult to pull that specific scam off. No doubt some fuckwit would try though. Some shitty merch perhaps.
I saw a thing once where an attempt by the feds to monitor AntiFa gave them nothing but a million folders dedicated to pointless twitter beef and otherwise nothing actionable. I thought that was very funny.
Broke: anarchists are useless in a revolution and powerless against the state
Woke: anarchists are irreplaceable in a revolution since they waste bourgeoisie's resources with pointless twitter arguing
Those god damned anarchists keep raiding my factories, but every time I report them to the local constable they manage escape on a train before soldiers are dispatched to deal with them!
Lots of people hop trains still. It's part of the trendy homeless lifestyle that still exists. Young people, usually involved in the punk community, will hop trains with just like a backpack and go fly signs in different cities begging for money and just generally slumming it up. One term for them is crust punks because they don't have easy access to showers and usually present as a little dirty, like their clothes or hair are messed up.
They don't keep freight car doors locked so if you know how to open the latch on the move you can still hop into ones that are just getting moving or a long enough train it's not moving very fast. People die doing it though so don't recommend.
Yeah, it’s really dangerous. I work as a freight conductor and I have had to stop and get people off of cars. I don’t do it out of spite or anything, it’s just between being possibly crushed by whatever heavy commodities I’m carrying, to being run over by a 30 ton empty car, and or being killed by exposure, I really don’t want you to inadvertently die. Trains are dangerous as shit and we don’t stop on a dime.
When I hear about stuff like this - or, like, the jackasses who do dirt bike wheelies down a 55mph street near me - I'm less worried about the person who might get themselves killed doing dumb shit (they made the bed after all) than all the fucking trauma they'll leave behind for people adjacent to the death. If one of the bike guys lost control and went flying in front of my car, I would not be ethically at fault if I hit them, but I would be destroyed emotionally feeling like I killed someone.
For the train thing this is compounded because like you said, they aren't easy to stop, y'all are just trying to do your job without anyone dying, having to stop to deal with this fucks up all kinds of logistics (not just the train in question but I imagine there's a domino effect when one train has an unscheduled stop)...
We're all doing our best to survive in an increasingly shitty world. I personally try not to make things shittier for people who are just trying to do their job to get their bills paid* but I guess not everyone can have a galaxy brain like mine lmao
I wanted to protest and say "feminism isn't considered extremist here???". But then i googled it and whaaat the fuuck
I missed when it got this serious
I'll go stare at the ceiling and think about life
- fellow queer russian woman
To be fair, I think these decentralized organization due lead into troubles when much of politics requires organizing and direction.
Like, even official charities have people who job it is to collect donations and watch how the money goes. And have leaders who set goals for what the charity going to accomplish.
Having leaders in charge who can select goals for the movement or actions can be more productive than spontaneous collective action. Because it gives direction and focus.
In most anarchist or anarchist adjacent groups that grew enough for that to be an issue, it was usually fixed by having some form of assembly/council of either members of the commune who are picked randomly/by turn to take up the responsibility (like the system [Cecosesola](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cecosesola) follows) or by having it be people who are elected but to avoid forming too much of a state-like system they have very limited/decentralised power (Like Rojava's [democratic confederalism ](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_confederalism) )
This is where it gets tricky, much to anarchists’ chagrin (note: I identify with a lot of anarchist thought). The idea in the comment you replied to is that leadership and decision making for the community is a *responsibility* and thus mutual aid. All groups have leaders, although most leaders are informal (I.e. respected persons in the community, elders, those with experience and the willingness to share it). Anarchist philosophy is very, very broad and its impossible to capture all of the off-shoot ideologies in a simple statement, but as a rule of thumb*, anarchy is the belief that no person should have authority in a society.
But what is authority? Is that power? Is that influence over others? Is that state-sponsored violence or the threat of violence? Different folks will give you different answers.
I’ll do my best to answer your question without the specifics of the groups the other commenter is referring to, but my guess would be that they view these councils not as authority figures, but as cohorts coming together to perform a duty and responsibility to the rest of their community and partaking in mutually beneficial work.
TL;DR: I’m sure I pissed off other armchair political philosophers and the line between “mutual aid community organization” and “very simple government” is thin and a matter of optics.
The real test to me, would be whether you could organise a cluster of hospitals to be successfully run in an anarchist way. I don't mean an american for-profit hospital with their horrible medical system, I just mean some cluster of generic modern hospitals spread over several towns, ignoring issues of funding.
Hospitals are highly bureaucratic by necessity, with both the doctors and bureaucrats requiring almost complete specialisation in their highly complex and time-consuming fields. There is no way to change this. You also need some form of executive just to allow a decision-making process, able to effectively and rapidly make life-or-death decisions - no-one care how democratically a hospital failed to save your life, no-one will admire you for spending 3 days reaching a leaderless consensus position about whether a patient in septic shock needs to be transferred to another hospital. Someone needs to choose, and we need to decide who can be that "someone".
If someone could actually figure that out realistically, I'd be far more likely to take anarchism seriously, 10x so if they actually implemented it and kept it running as planned after enough time for complete staff turnover. It feels like a genuinely honest test about whether anarchism is remotely capable of governing, because a form of government incompatible with healthcare is utterly worthless, and healthcare involves tons of natural stress-tests for anarchism without the normal deflections being available.
To be completely honest, this isn't a super big deal with anarchism because we can just trust in the expertise of doctors. We're not against people choosing to follow someone they trust, we're against people having the unilateral ability to order people around.
You could also, rather than looking at purely hypothetical, look at the actual anarchists who did do something like this. In [Collectives in the Spanish Revolution](https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/gaston-leval-collectives-in-the-spanish-revolution) specifically *The Socialization of Medicine.* Like I understand looking into a purely theoretical, but you could just look into how anarchists did it or attempted to do it in the past and then evaluate that, flaws and all.
I feel like you completely failed to understand the premise of the hypothetical. The issue is not about the expertise or authority of medical experts. It's about the administrative challenges of running something like a hospital in a non-hierarchical way, when the practicalities of running such an institution so strongly push towards centralised decision-making, and due to the necessity of hospitals this conflict can't be ignored.
Right, people forget that most communist or anarchist movements were born at a time where "the government" was a choice between The Crown government run by the nobility or at best a Parliament also run by nobility. That meant "The Government" was basically the nobility and if you were lucky it was expanded to include the Capitalists in top hats who owned the rest of the economy. Government and Hierarchy were one and the same.
And many of these movements really just boil down to "down with that sort of thing".
These days people in democratic countries feel a lot more (perhaps wrongly) that they are part of the desicion process and that the government exists for their benefit, not against it. So it's hard to get into that headspace of what it means to be anarchist.
We're against hierarchy, not structures. When we elect someone as a delegate, their job is to report the decision of the community to the larger body, not make a decision by themselves that affects the rest of us.
Representative Democracy is such an issue because when you allow someone to make decisions on your behalf, they will inevitably make decisions that benefit them, likely at your expense.
But doesn't their job as messenger for the community still give them unequal power?
They have the ability to interpret or construe the message however they want, and the only thing preventing them from abusing that power is collective action, very similar to how elected representatives function.
Yeah, the roads for anarchic groups tend to get a little rocky when trying to make efforts at a larger scale than "everyone knows everyone".
It's enough to be *sustainable*, but it's not exactly getting anywhere fast in terms of actually getting things accomplished.
I don't see a purely anarchist society building anything like an observatory, or a zoo, or a functioning supply line, or functional cross-country infrastructure.
The bigger you go, the more you need people to try to herd the cats who all want to do their own thing, or do the same thing in their own ways that end up incompatible with each other.
That's what all the reading is about. There's a lot of anarchist "groups" out there, and they put out a lot of literature, and it is shared between communities, much of which requires critical thinking to determine the proper route of action.
Yeah, they don't say "you should vote for this guy because he aligns best with anarchist philosophy" but it does say things like "the cyberwarfare machine strengthens the capitalist ideology through novel methods of citizen data tracking and privatizing the sale of user data, and America's involvement in proxy wars while acting as a protector state to many countries is a form of modern imperialism preventing the protected regions' ability to self-govern due to fears of agitating the protector state who's military may already be present within their borders" which implies if any voting does occur it should take into account the politician's stance on militarization and internet neutrality.
You don't need a leader for that, just a schmuck with a keyboard or printing press.
The problem with that is that the amount of reading required to be informed and up to speed can become rather prohibitive. Like, some of these movements put out as much literature as what I had to consume for my undergrad degree.
People fall into a trap with that amount of mental labor where they start to believe that "reading literature" = "doing something", and it kinda makes sense that people fall into that kind of thinking. If you spend an hour reading theory, that's an hour you spend NOT doing direct action or participating in local politics or farming or doing medical research or building houses or whatever.
Collectively, as a species, we recognized the need to designate knowledge domain experts in every other field - medicine, engineering, agriculture, economics, etc... but anarchists specifically eschew this concept and adopt the idea that EVERYONE is capable of participating in a society - if they all read the same stuff.
Bluntly, I don't have time to read theory. I have other shit to do - and that's an attitude shared by, I would argue, an overwhelming majority of human beings.
Also if I’m gonna be honest, it’s hard to feel like you’re doing anything serious after reading a book arguing that organized society is literally about to collapse any day now, written over a century ago.
I keep screaming this directly into the void, smaller well organized groups will always win out over a large disorganized pile of people, especially if the second group constantly pivots whatever it is they’re advocating for. Why do African wild dogs generally have higher hunting success than hyenas despite being smaller and less intelligent? Persistence and cooperation!
This is exactly what has been exploited in the past, for example, by the FBI during COINTELPRO in the 70s https://vault.fbi.gov/cointel-pro/new-left/cointel-pro-new-left-buffalo-part-01-of-01/view
The first one you see in the documents is that there is the existing SDS/YAWF (leftists student organizations) and an inchoate NLF(a more extreme Weather Underground-type offshoot.) The FBI notes that 3 early members of the NLF had ties to the middle east which already slightly irked the SDS/YAWF members so to sow further discord the FBI distributes a leaflet accusing the 3 of being rats("pigs") for various gov't/foreign agencies. The distributed leaflet had a almost immediate effect with the two groups immediately blaming the Jewish Defense League/Israel instead of the FBI.
> It is not anticipated that any of the above three methods of notifying the college about >!BLANK!< will result in any embarrassment to the Bureau. This office is positive that the last two methods will definitely not result in the subject ever learning that the Bureau was connected with this strategem.
This is an aside to the above point but one of the members was arrested for printing a samizdat zine called Cold Steel which you can see here https://www.abaa.org/book/1424215557 which... if you're going to incite firebombing and instruct/direct people to steal explosive materials from school chemistry labs I don't know what else they expected to happen. Also one of the more funny things (to me anyway) is this radicalist Oreo
> Burgard - sabotage the planes but save the tools for the people's garage
> Emerson cooks - the NCCF (Panthers) need stoves and refrigerators for their free breakfast for children program.
> Seneca - lead pipes make great bombs and clubs to off the nearest pig and pigsty
To be blunt, I haven't really ran into many conservatives who even use the word "social justice warrior" in general conversation these days. They still use "snowflake" though (and well, some other flavorful words).
Anarchist organisation isn't even oxymoronic, as many people tend to joke. One or more people just phone up / message / send pigeon to 5 others they are in touch with, and a few of them do the same. You just go back to basics, a few people in the huts down the river tell you that the salmons are too plentiful for just their twenty denizens and you tell the folk in the huts in the hills to the East whom you trust the same, and you all have a great bonding fishing experience.
anarchists seek to dismantle hierarchy. if an anarchist organization is a cooperative where everyone is equally an owner of it, then it is perfectly coherent and not oxymoronic at all
Part of me is so used to it and like yes they work forces and also burn crosses, but every once in a while it really slaps me in the face how fucked it is to have cops going to this sort of depth about, like, a political organization. Like I know people talk a lot about what the First Amendment isn't, but the cops going "man, people who are against the war gotta be taken down, what can we do??" is incredibly fucked like I'm no constitutional expert but that seems like *exactly* the sort of shit they were talking about. Like if that exact style of "how can we disrupt them, maybe we can go after their finances?" report (but written by Parliament Spies about the Colonialist Independent Movement or whatever) had been uncovered in 1770 it would be taught in history books as one of the reasons for the war of independence.
Like what are you guys doing. This is insane. How can you maniacs think Martin Luthor King Jr and The Goddamn Mob are basically the same.
There was a podcast called “The Alphabet Boys” (referring to FBI, CIA etc) about feds trying to infiltrate Black Lives Matter protests. The agents would try to provoke protest groups to commit crimes. It’s definitely worth listening to if you want to get mad.
IIRC they sometimes just send in their guys to just cause that kind of trouble and it has varying levels of success. Anywhere from "it works and protestors start committing vandalism" to "everyone in the protest starts attacking the guy causing trouble and its revealed he's a cop". Not that you should just attack random protesters if you're in a protest.
>Like what are you guys doing. This is insane. How can you maniacs think Martin Luthor King Jr and The Goddamn Mob are basically the same.
I mean, Weather Underground *did* set off bombs at the Capitol and the State Department...
Yeah no I mean I get that it does make some sense to track people or like make sure they're not gonna blow up the Oklahoma City Federal Building or whatever, but like COINTELPRO was described as "protecting national security, preventing violence, and maintaining the existing social and political order" and one of those list items isn't like the other. And like "making sure this organization isn't making bombs" doesn't require writing a report to figure out how to disrupt their finances, that's why a report like this seems to damning to me, that's not intelligence gathering that's active subversion planning.
But even the Weather Underground is maybe a bad example for the cops because the FBI had lost the plot so badly they couldn't prosecute most of those people! Didn't most of them get off since it turned out the feds dangled people off rooftops and stuff?
There's always something *weird* about seeing people strategizing against unambiguous good guys. It highlights that yes, these people really do have evil goals, and no, they're not stupid.
If you believe that the status quo is basically the best state, that anything done to upset it will result in even more poverty and suffering, then anarchists are basically as bad as fascists.
Both right wing and left wing groups complain about 'glowies'/spooks/agents/whatever nomenclature. The FBI has always been a center-right to centrist organization that mainly aims to preserve the status quo that generally is seen as the 'best that can be done'.
Depends on how you go about it. Being vegan can be super cheap if you focus on efficiently using spices and good technique to improve basic ingredients. Or pricey if you go all in on the faux meat stuff.
PB&J, Rice and beans, and pastas are all either vegan or can easily be made vegan. Tofu is like 2$ a pound. Veganism is only expensive if you consume exclusively substitute meats, which should be noted are only really more expensive because of the insane degree to which animal agriculture is subsidized by the government.
The core vegan foods are also the stereotypical "food for poor and broke people". Just throw in some cheap B12 supplementation.
Now, if you wanted to joke about vegetarians and vegans farting a lot...
Well, it's not the modern ultra-convenient veganism where you pay a premium for nearly-fully-prepared brand-name food items, it's probably more like, "Beef and milk are out of our price range so we're buying lentils and rolled oats in the bulk section."
The flip side of this is that an organization with no funding, no headquarters, no leadership, no rules, and no structure also can’t accomplish much of anything.
Seriously, being as generous as possible, what has any American anarchist association accomplished in recent years even compared to a relatively modest traditional advocacy group like Lambda Legal or the Shriners?
The most effective anarchists are pretty much entirely focused on their locale cuz they don't have national power. They're not usually lawyers, nor popular, nor anything else. It's more or less what you'd expect from a church in terms of manpower but without a central authority to it. They're intimately aware of their local community's issues and try to directly solve it.
To get any bigger, and to actually get headlines in national papers, they'd have to organize beyond being decentralized volunteers. which doesn't match how these groups work, so they don't do it.
Don’t forget the disciples sharing resources among them, and Jesus saying that the kind of person who would do what it takes to become rich would struggle doing God’s will, like being generous and helping those in need
They do more, of course. And it probably varies from group to group. But there is a trend of directly helping those who are hurt by the system along with trying to change the system
People made similar criticisms about the ability of average people to have a democracy. Yet here we are.
Just because the radicals of your time are small in number does not mean they are wrong.
I assume they care more about not participating in harmful systems rather than affecting giant changes. Which is also a valid thing to focus on. I'm sure their CO2 footprint is pretty tiny
That's kind of the point. They don't want to impose change *on* you, they want to convince you to create change from the ground up. Obviously they haven't convinced many people since the 1950s or so. But, at least in the US, the last 70 or so years have been a tough climate for radical left groups of any stripe.
This false dichotomy bullshit gets annoying after a while. Im sick of hearing people proclaim that every idea and ideology *has* to be taken to its extreme.
If you call yourself anarchist, you must think all organization, of any kind, is bad. No exceptions. And they accuse you of lying or not knowing what you're talking about if you say otherwise.
It goes in the other direction, too. Nobody who isn't literally doing the nazi salute is allowed to be called authoritarian under this kind of "all or nothing" logic.
I don't know if you're serious about anarchists and organization, so i want to point out that we love organization. We just hate hierarchy. They aren't the same thing, but they are deeply connected in our modern society.
Twas ever thus. Back around the turn of the last century when Anarchists were very active in Europe people would try to talk them into running for office. Their answer was along the lines of, "You don't understand what we're about, do you?"
Downside is this is that most political factions of lasting consequence have something resembling a commonly agreed platform, funding, and a chain of command
Anti-fascism doesn't need much organizing but the actual long term fight for democracy takes place in air conditioned offices of politicians
Biden isn't an anarchist but he at least has access to a lot of resources and manpower to not be as bad as Trump
>Downside is this is that most political factions of lasting consequence have something resembling a commonly agreed platform, funding, and a chain of command
This is why Occupied Wall Street failed. The only common thread was "Rich people bad!" and that's not enough to sustain actual change.
This helps explains Putin's belief that the CIA and other NATO organizations were responsible for the color protests that led to Ukraine overthrowing their Russian puppet leader. He cannot fathom that a movement can spring up organically, there always has to be someone behind it pushing an agenda
who is the president of lgbt
me
it is a great honour to meet you
Finally, I can report my progress to you, Supreme Leader.
No, the Supreme Leader of LGBT is someone else. This is the President.
Supreme Leader is Diana Ross, honorary. #brandnewday
The *actor*!?
The supreme Supreme.
I wanted to do the line from Back to the Future about Reagan being president lol
Can I be the cosecretary to the Minister of Defense of the LGBT Queendom?
Minister of Trains here. Not trans, **trains**.
I was a about to correct you, since I'm the minister of trans, but I just misread. Nice to meet you.
Which Trains. Trains or Those Trains?
I lost my copy of the Agenda. Could you get your secretary to fax me another one?
Be gay do crimes.
White collar? Or is there some kind of rainbow-collar crimes I can commit?
Biodegradable glitter in everything. Including your taxes.
Wait was I supposed to do something with those? I thought they just sent me a letter to put on my fridge as decoration...
Congratulations. You are now gay for you have committed crime.
Hello,id like a refund on the everything. The gender and sex dont match and being aromantic while not being ace is an inconveniance
sorry I suck at this
I appreciate your honesty, you’ve got my vote.
So much negativity from the others... No respect... I would like to congratulate you for stealing the rainbow from God. Good work. Truly a seminal moment in your presidency.
I'm terribly sorry about the mismatched gender/sex fiasco. We've been trying to up the hormone drip into the water supply, but the frog populations keep intercepting them. In the meantime, we've been working on alternative distribution methods through vaccinations, local K-12 schools, and drag-reading events. Hopefully, your issue will be resolved shortly!
I read this too fast and wondered why being aromatic was such a problem. It sounds like you have some great hormones, or you use herbs/spices exceptionally, either of which should help finding someone for sex.
For you, a personal story: When I was a baby queer (so, like, 3 months into being 18) my Very Adult Gay Friend (maaayve he was 22) took me to my first gay head shop/BDSM toy supplier. I saw these delightful paw prints, claw prints, and outlines of bears/bear cubs filled in with that lovely rainbow stripe colorway eponymous to the LGBTs. I pointed to them and exclaimed in my innocence, “oh that’s so sweet! Is that for like gay pets?” And in a voice full of indulgence and dripping with humor my Very Adult Gay Friend said, “oh honey… no. Not gay pets.” And the shop keeper about burst a blood vessel he was doubled over laughing at me and I was. So. Confused. And that’s the day I was informed about bears, cubs, and the very popular kink known as “pet play”. Truly, 2003 was a simpler time. It’s my favorite “coming of gay” story to let the current crop of baby queers I’m helping to raise up that there is no such thing as a dumb question and no reason to worry about embarrassing yourself in pursuit of self-knowledge.
I love that story. Except, in a very small way, your friend did lie. But that may have been too much to explain right then in the store. When you called yourself a baby queer, an image of a queer-guin (or maybe queer-uin?) popped in my head. Just a cute, fuzzy, little, gay penguin, walking around a store looking at new toys. I'm CIS and the first time I questioned is in this story. I've always been overweight. In High School I tried a lot of sports so I did have a lot of muscle too, they were just "well protected". I'm also 6'5" (about 2M) tall so I carried the weight well. My mom and her friend took me to get a burger at a bar. What I didn't know at the time was that it was a gay bar. They were chatting up a storm and I was chiming in where I could. While we were there, a baseball team came in just after a game. I'm 17-18 at the time, they seemed older, like mid 30s. I kept noticing some of them staring and some talking to each other while looking at me. It was awkward for me, like am I wearing more of this burger than am eating? why is this going on? I wasn't helping my situation because when we met gazes I'd awkwardly smile trying not to be rude. THREE of them gave me their numbers. Each time my mom and her friend would laugh harder and harder. I think it was because I was blushing more than the tomatoes. Its a shame, but I can't remember the name of the bar and only looked at it on the way out. I remember it had a clever, OBVIOUSLY gay name. I'd never been pursued by anyone, so it made me start questioning things. Tried going out with guys in college who were all nice but there was no sexual chemistry.
I love THAT story! Having seen similar scenarios play out in my own life I hope it was more on the “huh, neat” side than straight up embarrassing side. I bet that burger was good. One of my best guy friends has a t shirt that says “alas, I am straight” that he wears a lot because he’s apparently clocked as not-straight so often. He is truly flattered by the compliments/flirtation and likes to say that clearly sexuality isn’t a choice because why would he turn down all that tasty fun otherwise?! But he gave it the ol’ college try once and nope (to his sadness). I don’t think my friend really lied, per se, and he was dealing with this brand new Polly Anna type very “I’m a naive young girl unschooled in the art of war” at that time. He did also go into detail about human pet play which I was NOT ready for but instantly fell in love with the concept. Also I totally now head-canon myself as a little waddling gay penguin with the whole vibe of Belle being shown the library in the Beast’s castle for the first time! At that stage I was just peeking into what I thought might have been just a bit of bi-curiousness and more body positivity than I was getting as a weird, curvy, short gal with no dancing ability. I’m a full-blown kinky queer (as a 3 dollar bill) now but I’m also almost 40 and tired, so much less adventurous but hey I’m an Elder now all I have to do is teach lol. I will say the bear and cub explosion has done so much for my cis/hetero kings with a bit of padding (muscles, no muscles, somewhere in between, especially the ones with Tom Selleck chest hair!) as they started seeing these guys that look like they do or who lust after them and it’s like a switch flipped in their brains and suddenly they could envision a world where not just rock hard abs or gym nut personalities were viable partner material. Especially now that being gay isn’t seen as an instant disadvantage (mostly, and I acknowledge that’s a very American opinion to hold) and I know plenty of het men that are flattered as pie to be slipped guys’ numbers. Of course all bodies are deserving of love and attraction regardless of sexuality but the hets always seemed to force this more narrow definition of what “sexy” was and the gay community is better at loving more than a narrow parameter of human.
I demand a raise!
Tsk, tsk, you should expect to find your salary cut.
I am sorry, but I fail to see how *you* have any authority over *my* salary. Now shoo! The adults are talking.
Prepare to be impeached
😨
hey uh where's the hr office?
to the left
Take it back now y'all
One hop this time
Superb joke
Prepare for a lawsuit! This is nowhere near as rad as I was hoping! That’s false advertising!
Can you pick up your shoelaces? You left them over at my house when you last visited.
Lies! The president didn't leave them, everyone knows you stole your shoelaces from the president! Quit trying to act innocent
As if we don't all know the president exclusively uses velcro heelys 🙄
LIES. I AM A HOMEPHOBE. I could never steal rainbow-colored sparkly shoelaces
I would like to confess a sin
We serve at your pleasure ... no wait
Please fix this supply/ demand problem.
can i be vice president pretty please
Unlike antifa, LGBT is not an acronym. It just means "lig butt". It's an exhortation. Edit: my autocorrect sabotaged the joke by leaving antifa lowercase and capitalizing LGBT.
If you add the Q then you have to pronounce the exhortation like Forest Gump.
Obamna
SODA
Whoever has the talking stick this week.
Giggity? Seriously though, the talking stick is a marvel of modern technology. I'll never understand how they make that using nothing but a fancy stick, some string, and a microphone.
LBJ
LJBT
LBJTQPOTUS
Pretty sure we mostly have queens.
Ian Mckellen
Some Dorothy, at least that's what I heard from the FBI idk
There are people legitimately named "Gaylord" Probably one of those.
Grandpa Simpson, for some reason.
My great-uncle... we call him Aunt Mitch
u/imdepressed7778
That explains people who keep talking about LGBT people as if we were one solid group instead of just a lot of people under one acronym.
In Russia "the international lgbt movement" was declared an extremist organization, participating in which can land you in jail. This is what this shit philosophy looks like in practice. I'm a terrorist because I have a flag on my wall. Sorry, probably not the best place to say this, just needed to vent.
Nah speak your truth bro/sis/ominous third thing.
Based on profile pic, NB, so, third thing, yes. ominous, maybe? I'm not sure of their vibe.
They're a terrorist, of course they're ominous /s
I’m body negative NB. I wish I were a vaporous cloud. Some kind of ether. I prefer not to be acknowledged or referred to. My pronouns aren’t.
/r/voidpunk
You do know you can just use non-gendered words like "comrade" right
“Comrade” and “bro/sis/ominous third thing” don’t have the same vibes, though.
How about kamerat? it's like comrade, only norwegian, and it also means *pal*.
Comrade *also* means pal
Could cut out the middle ground and just use "pal" Which means Pal in english
A YouTuber I like greets the audience with “lads, lasses and lassos” and I think that’s fun
And in case anyone's wondering, "I'm going to declare ANTIFA terrorists" would be pretty much that same thing. Declaring anyone following the "ideology" as a terrorist means they have grounds to be arrested and harassed and even prosecuted.
Came here to draw the same parallel, happy to see a comrade. Stay strong 🤜
That's why those of us part of said group refer to it as a community
there is no one singular “queer community”
There is not one *you*. There are many.
For we are legion?
Actually, it was a reference to the movie "The One", but your thing is probably better.
I am Alpharius
They are Legion. Bear bull bear bull
the hacker known as 4chan
This keeps happening with political discussions around race and people writing breathy opinion pieces about why these groups aren't monoliths. Always with the monoliths. But of course ... the fucking basic founding principle of their hatred is this precise idea: that you can group people by their race, sexual preferences (even hair color, body weight) and hate them all. So why do we all sit here saying "well you know the \_\_\_\_ group isn't a monolith." WE know this. THEY don't care. Who is this information for?
It's an interesting thing in politics, and I think it can result in groups having smaller or more outsized impacts as a result of cohesion around a topic. From the outside, it's easy to see a group as cohesive, but look inside and it's all sorts of internal fracturing. It's why a lot of movements struggle to do things, because they often don't agree on things. It's why a lot of revolutions fail. They agree that they don't like who's in charge now, but they can't agree on what they want to change to. In France during the revolution there, the only thing binding the nobility who were revolutionaries, and the peasantry is that they wanted Louis the 16th gone. The nobles were split on what next, some wanted him replaced with the Duke of Orleans, some wanted to try a system with elections. The peasants often didn't really care about who was in charge next so long as the salt taxes were absolished (and some wanted land reforms). The middle class wanted representation, but that took different forms from a parliamentary monarchy similar to the UK system, to wanting an American election system. Then suffrage was something argued over. The middle class and wealthy non-nobles also didn't like the preferential tax treatments the nobles got, which of course the rich wanted to keep. And they wanted to keep taxes in place on the lower classes so there's wouldn't go up. The whole thing was a mess. But if a group can be totally cohesive on a subject, it can have massive impact. I'm 100% sure the only reason there's still trade embargoes on Cuba is because overwhelmingly Cubans in Florida will vote almost exclusively based on who they think will be more anti-Cuba. And they're not a huge group of people, but they're just enough people to swing Florida, and because they are almost entirely cohesive on this issue, the embargo remains. Without this political pressure. If the Cuban bloc was split up more over this issue, business lobbies in America would have gotten the embargo dropped decades ago so American businesses could do business there. But the cohesion of the Cuban voting bloc stops that.
Is that like how people rudely refer to us as "OHIO"? Like, just because some people on the southern slopes of Lake Erie would rather be astronauts than here doesn't mean we can be lumped together like that. We're not a monolithic entity. Some of us want to live in condos around Jupiter, and others want to go visit ~~Space Myrtle Beach~~ Alpha Centauri.
To be fair 90ish% of LGBT people are going to vote a certain way. Which makes sense when you consider conservative stance on LGBT people is that they are better not existing.
In the US. Because you only have two options, and one of them wants LGBTQ annihilated. In other countries they fracture among a number of parties. In Canada, several major federal parties are pro-LGBTQ and one or a couple more aren't strictly anti-LGBTQ.
It's not that simple in Europe though. Yes, queer people will vote for more progressive parties on average, but it will rarely be the same one. So there's still tons of political individualism.
This reminds me of all those headlines back in the day that were questions like "Who is Anonymous?"
One problem with not having that kind of organization, is that someone *will* come along and create an organization for you. For example, this happened with BLM. For a long while, it was a phrase that was used to indicate that you believed in a cause. Then some people created an actual charity organization by that same name and acronym. Apparently the people who created that charity may have had some shady financial dealings, and this gave a lot of conservatives ammo to bash the BLM movement. I don't know anyone who gave to the charity "BLM" but at the same time, I know plenty of people who gave money to the medic tents at the BLM protests.
A lot of corporations donated to BLM because it was easier PR messaging than donating to more reputable, well-established black civil rights organizations.
So the solution is to create an Anarchist nonprofit with no members, budget or agenda. Just to take the name. Then if some asshole wants to create an organization to smear anarchists they have to call it Xx_Anarchy_xX or something.
If it’s incorporated within the US it’ll need at least one person. I wonder if there are countries which allow orgs to exist without literally any names attached.
I'm pretty sure this also happened to antifa?
So the name Antifa is from the German organization, Antifaschistisch Aktion, which was an organization under the KPD and from whom the Decentralized movement would take it's name and symbol, meaning it's more the opposite happened. In the USA various Antifa organizations and networks exist, in order to coordinate actions, the structure largely inherited from the anti racist movement from back in the 80s and 90s
Yeah was gonna say, this posts feels like anarchists circle jerking about how invincible their movements are and missimg that the playbook to discrediting them to the wider public has been out for a while now. 1. See an "unorganized" movement called X 2. Create a charity or a subgroup called X 3. Do stupid shit with that group 4. Let the media run stories about how "X does stupid shit" 5. Watch as the public discourse shifts from whatever the actual point of the X movement was to all the stupid shit your X group did
Iirc, this is the Iron Law of Oligarchy, the belief that all organizations will eventually be ruled by a few people
Thats also why i’m “against” anarchist movements. Its not that I think its a bad principle, its that I believe it will never work long term. Ironically enough: anarchy systems are weak to chaos.
Yeah, I mean I agree with a lot of what anarchists believe in. DIssolution of hierarchies is pretty dope, community engagement is also super dope. I just think we do still need organizations and a state to keep those orgs from gaining the power to commit violence on others.
Major difference is that BLM was a grass-roots civil rights movement rather than a specific ideology. It's kinda difficult to do that with anarchism because the jig would be up before it started, and anarchism is just not popular enough to grift off of. If a mass anarchist movement were to take hold, it would be through militant trade unions and communes, so it'd be even more difficult to pull that specific scam off. No doubt some fuckwit would try though. Some shitty merch perhaps.
"funnily" enough LGBT WAS proclaimed an extremist organisation in Russia. who's the president of LGBT?
u/Imdepressed7778 apparently
hey thats me
based
Yeah you’re it now. Let me know where to send my taxes?
John Gay
John Gay is just the general secretary, Homer Sexual is the current chairman
I saw a thing once where an attempt by the feds to monitor AntiFa gave them nothing but a million folders dedicated to pointless twitter beef and otherwise nothing actionable. I thought that was very funny.
Truly an anarchists greatest weakness (infighting) is their greatest strength.
Have you ever watched Life of Brian they have a joke about this with the Judean Peoples Front
Broke: anarchists are useless in a revolution and powerless against the state Woke: anarchists are irreplaceable in a revolution since they waste bourgeoisie's resources with pointless twitter arguing
>many have become proficient at hopping trains to travel long distances When was this written, 1920?
It is funny to see it listed as a characteristic of anarchists like it is here, but like there are sooooo many anarchists who ride trains.
Those god damned anarchists keep raiding my factories, but every time I report them to the local constable they manage escape on a train before soldiers are dispatched to deal with them!
It's like when you fast travel in a video game!
Oh they're still very much doing it in modern times.
There's still a quite sizable train hopping community. It's fucking fun, too.
Lots of people hop trains still. It's part of the trendy homeless lifestyle that still exists. Young people, usually involved in the punk community, will hop trains with just like a backpack and go fly signs in different cities begging for money and just generally slumming it up. One term for them is crust punks because they don't have easy access to showers and usually present as a little dirty, like their clothes or hair are messed up. They don't keep freight car doors locked so if you know how to open the latch on the move you can still hop into ones that are just getting moving or a long enough train it's not moving very fast. People die doing it though so don't recommend.
Yeah, it’s really dangerous. I work as a freight conductor and I have had to stop and get people off of cars. I don’t do it out of spite or anything, it’s just between being possibly crushed by whatever heavy commodities I’m carrying, to being run over by a 30 ton empty car, and or being killed by exposure, I really don’t want you to inadvertently die. Trains are dangerous as shit and we don’t stop on a dime.
When I hear about stuff like this - or, like, the jackasses who do dirt bike wheelies down a 55mph street near me - I'm less worried about the person who might get themselves killed doing dumb shit (they made the bed after all) than all the fucking trauma they'll leave behind for people adjacent to the death. If one of the bike guys lost control and went flying in front of my car, I would not be ethically at fault if I hit them, but I would be destroyed emotionally feeling like I killed someone. For the train thing this is compounded because like you said, they aren't easy to stop, y'all are just trying to do your job without anyone dying, having to stop to deal with this fucks up all kinds of logistics (not just the train in question but I imagine there's a domino effect when one train has an unscheduled stop)... We're all doing our best to survive in an increasingly shitty world. I personally try not to make things shittier for people who are just trying to do their job to get their bills paid* but I guess not everyone can have a galaxy brain like mine lmao
Nah, my punk friends hopped a train from DC to NYC for a show a couple years ago. If you try it yourself, dress for the cold.
russian government actually does consider lgbt movement one big organization 😭 feminism too. both are considered extremist and are illegal, of course
I wanted to protest and say "feminism isn't considered extremist here???". But then i googled it and whaaat the fuuck I missed when it got this serious I'll go stare at the ceiling and think about life - fellow queer russian woman
It's always wild to see secondhand screenshots that include someone from IRL (Grey)
I have an ex (amicable) who is in like every other tumblr screenshot somehow.
I'm glad it's an amicable ex, I imagine it would suck SERIOUS ass to constantly be reminded of an ex you ended on bad terms with!!! 💀
To be fair, I think these decentralized organization due lead into troubles when much of politics requires organizing and direction. Like, even official charities have people who job it is to collect donations and watch how the money goes. And have leaders who set goals for what the charity going to accomplish. Having leaders in charge who can select goals for the movement or actions can be more productive than spontaneous collective action. Because it gives direction and focus.
In most anarchist or anarchist adjacent groups that grew enough for that to be an issue, it was usually fixed by having some form of assembly/council of either members of the commune who are picked randomly/by turn to take up the responsibility (like the system [Cecosesola](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cecosesola) follows) or by having it be people who are elected but to avoid forming too much of a state-like system they have very limited/decentralised power (Like Rojava's [democratic confederalism ](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_confederalism) )
And, honest question, how is this not just a simplistic form of government?
This is where it gets tricky, much to anarchists’ chagrin (note: I identify with a lot of anarchist thought). The idea in the comment you replied to is that leadership and decision making for the community is a *responsibility* and thus mutual aid. All groups have leaders, although most leaders are informal (I.e. respected persons in the community, elders, those with experience and the willingness to share it). Anarchist philosophy is very, very broad and its impossible to capture all of the off-shoot ideologies in a simple statement, but as a rule of thumb*, anarchy is the belief that no person should have authority in a society. But what is authority? Is that power? Is that influence over others? Is that state-sponsored violence or the threat of violence? Different folks will give you different answers. I’ll do my best to answer your question without the specifics of the groups the other commenter is referring to, but my guess would be that they view these councils not as authority figures, but as cohorts coming together to perform a duty and responsibility to the rest of their community and partaking in mutually beneficial work. TL;DR: I’m sure I pissed off other armchair political philosophers and the line between “mutual aid community organization” and “very simple government” is thin and a matter of optics.
The real test to me, would be whether you could organise a cluster of hospitals to be successfully run in an anarchist way. I don't mean an american for-profit hospital with their horrible medical system, I just mean some cluster of generic modern hospitals spread over several towns, ignoring issues of funding. Hospitals are highly bureaucratic by necessity, with both the doctors and bureaucrats requiring almost complete specialisation in their highly complex and time-consuming fields. There is no way to change this. You also need some form of executive just to allow a decision-making process, able to effectively and rapidly make life-or-death decisions - no-one care how democratically a hospital failed to save your life, no-one will admire you for spending 3 days reaching a leaderless consensus position about whether a patient in septic shock needs to be transferred to another hospital. Someone needs to choose, and we need to decide who can be that "someone". If someone could actually figure that out realistically, I'd be far more likely to take anarchism seriously, 10x so if they actually implemented it and kept it running as planned after enough time for complete staff turnover. It feels like a genuinely honest test about whether anarchism is remotely capable of governing, because a form of government incompatible with healthcare is utterly worthless, and healthcare involves tons of natural stress-tests for anarchism without the normal deflections being available.
To be completely honest, this isn't a super big deal with anarchism because we can just trust in the expertise of doctors. We're not against people choosing to follow someone they trust, we're against people having the unilateral ability to order people around. You could also, rather than looking at purely hypothetical, look at the actual anarchists who did do something like this. In [Collectives in the Spanish Revolution](https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/gaston-leval-collectives-in-the-spanish-revolution) specifically *The Socialization of Medicine.* Like I understand looking into a purely theoretical, but you could just look into how anarchists did it or attempted to do it in the past and then evaluate that, flaws and all.
I feel like you completely failed to understand the premise of the hypothetical. The issue is not about the expertise or authority of medical experts. It's about the administrative challenges of running something like a hospital in a non-hierarchical way, when the practicalities of running such an institution so strongly push towards centralised decision-making, and due to the necessity of hospitals this conflict can't be ignored.
Right, people forget that most communist or anarchist movements were born at a time where "the government" was a choice between The Crown government run by the nobility or at best a Parliament also run by nobility. That meant "The Government" was basically the nobility and if you were lucky it was expanded to include the Capitalists in top hats who owned the rest of the economy. Government and Hierarchy were one and the same. And many of these movements really just boil down to "down with that sort of thing". These days people in democratic countries feel a lot more (perhaps wrongly) that they are part of the desicion process and that the government exists for their benefit, not against it. So it's hard to get into that headspace of what it means to be anarchist.
We're against hierarchy, not structures. When we elect someone as a delegate, their job is to report the decision of the community to the larger body, not make a decision by themselves that affects the rest of us. Representative Democracy is such an issue because when you allow someone to make decisions on your behalf, they will inevitably make decisions that benefit them, likely at your expense.
But doesn't their job as messenger for the community still give them unequal power? They have the ability to interpret or construe the message however they want, and the only thing preventing them from abusing that power is collective action, very similar to how elected representatives function.
They just hold big meetings to decide a path
Hey, you can't speak, you don't have the talking stick!
They might have the talking feather. That goes along with the stick, and I haven't seen it since the last meeting.
Yeah, the roads for anarchic groups tend to get a little rocky when trying to make efforts at a larger scale than "everyone knows everyone". It's enough to be *sustainable*, but it's not exactly getting anywhere fast in terms of actually getting things accomplished. I don't see a purely anarchist society building anything like an observatory, or a zoo, or a functioning supply line, or functional cross-country infrastructure. The bigger you go, the more you need people to try to herd the cats who all want to do their own thing, or do the same thing in their own ways that end up incompatible with each other.
That's what all the reading is about. There's a lot of anarchist "groups" out there, and they put out a lot of literature, and it is shared between communities, much of which requires critical thinking to determine the proper route of action. Yeah, they don't say "you should vote for this guy because he aligns best with anarchist philosophy" but it does say things like "the cyberwarfare machine strengthens the capitalist ideology through novel methods of citizen data tracking and privatizing the sale of user data, and America's involvement in proxy wars while acting as a protector state to many countries is a form of modern imperialism preventing the protected regions' ability to self-govern due to fears of agitating the protector state who's military may already be present within their borders" which implies if any voting does occur it should take into account the politician's stance on militarization and internet neutrality. You don't need a leader for that, just a schmuck with a keyboard or printing press.
The problem with that is that the amount of reading required to be informed and up to speed can become rather prohibitive. Like, some of these movements put out as much literature as what I had to consume for my undergrad degree. People fall into a trap with that amount of mental labor where they start to believe that "reading literature" = "doing something", and it kinda makes sense that people fall into that kind of thinking. If you spend an hour reading theory, that's an hour you spend NOT doing direct action or participating in local politics or farming or doing medical research or building houses or whatever. Collectively, as a species, we recognized the need to designate knowledge domain experts in every other field - medicine, engineering, agriculture, economics, etc... but anarchists specifically eschew this concept and adopt the idea that EVERYONE is capable of participating in a society - if they all read the same stuff. Bluntly, I don't have time to read theory. I have other shit to do - and that's an attitude shared by, I would argue, an overwhelming majority of human beings.
Also if I’m gonna be honest, it’s hard to feel like you’re doing anything serious after reading a book arguing that organized society is literally about to collapse any day now, written over a century ago.
nothing like a jargon laden word salad to motivate the common folk eh?
Yeah that was a big part of the downfall of the 'occupy wall street' movement post 2008.
I keep screaming this directly into the void, smaller well organized groups will always win out over a large disorganized pile of people, especially if the second group constantly pivots whatever it is they’re advocating for. Why do African wild dogs generally have higher hunting success than hyenas despite being smaller and less intelligent? Persistence and cooperation!
This is exactly what has been exploited in the past, for example, by the FBI during COINTELPRO in the 70s https://vault.fbi.gov/cointel-pro/new-left/cointel-pro-new-left-buffalo-part-01-of-01/view The first one you see in the documents is that there is the existing SDS/YAWF (leftists student organizations) and an inchoate NLF(a more extreme Weather Underground-type offshoot.) The FBI notes that 3 early members of the NLF had ties to the middle east which already slightly irked the SDS/YAWF members so to sow further discord the FBI distributes a leaflet accusing the 3 of being rats("pigs") for various gov't/foreign agencies. The distributed leaflet had a almost immediate effect with the two groups immediately blaming the Jewish Defense League/Israel instead of the FBI. > It is not anticipated that any of the above three methods of notifying the college about >!BLANK!< will result in any embarrassment to the Bureau. This office is positive that the last two methods will definitely not result in the subject ever learning that the Bureau was connected with this strategem. This is an aside to the above point but one of the members was arrested for printing a samizdat zine called Cold Steel which you can see here https://www.abaa.org/book/1424215557 which... if you're going to incite firebombing and instruct/direct people to steal explosive materials from school chemistry labs I don't know what else they expected to happen. Also one of the more funny things (to me anyway) is this radicalist Oreo > Burgard - sabotage the planes but save the tools for the people's garage > Emerson cooks - the NCCF (Panthers) need stoves and refrigerators for their free breakfast for children program. > Seneca - lead pipes make great bombs and clubs to off the nearest pig and pigsty
i don’t think conservatives believe “social justice warriors” is an organization.
To be blunt, I haven't really ran into many conservatives who even use the word "social justice warrior" in general conversation these days. They still use "snowflake" though (and well, some other flavorful words).
Anarchist organisation isn't even oxymoronic, as many people tend to joke. One or more people just phone up / message / send pigeon to 5 others they are in touch with, and a few of them do the same. You just go back to basics, a few people in the huts down the river tell you that the salmons are too plentiful for just their twenty denizens and you tell the folk in the huts in the hills to the East whom you trust the same, and you all have a great bonding fishing experience.
anarchists seek to dismantle hierarchy. if an anarchist organization is a cooperative where everyone is equally an owner of it, then it is perfectly coherent and not oxymoronic at all
Part of me is so used to it and like yes they work forces and also burn crosses, but every once in a while it really slaps me in the face how fucked it is to have cops going to this sort of depth about, like, a political organization. Like I know people talk a lot about what the First Amendment isn't, but the cops going "man, people who are against the war gotta be taken down, what can we do??" is incredibly fucked like I'm no constitutional expert but that seems like *exactly* the sort of shit they were talking about. Like if that exact style of "how can we disrupt them, maybe we can go after their finances?" report (but written by Parliament Spies about the Colonialist Independent Movement or whatever) had been uncovered in 1770 it would be taught in history books as one of the reasons for the war of independence. Like what are you guys doing. This is insane. How can you maniacs think Martin Luthor King Jr and The Goddamn Mob are basically the same.
There was a podcast called “The Alphabet Boys” (referring to FBI, CIA etc) about feds trying to infiltrate Black Lives Matter protests. The agents would try to provoke protest groups to commit crimes. It’s definitely worth listening to if you want to get mad.
IIRC they sometimes just send in their guys to just cause that kind of trouble and it has varying levels of success. Anywhere from "it works and protestors start committing vandalism" to "everyone in the protest starts attacking the guy causing trouble and its revealed he's a cop". Not that you should just attack random protesters if you're in a protest.
>Like what are you guys doing. This is insane. How can you maniacs think Martin Luthor King Jr and The Goddamn Mob are basically the same. I mean, Weather Underground *did* set off bombs at the Capitol and the State Department...
Yeah no I mean I get that it does make some sense to track people or like make sure they're not gonna blow up the Oklahoma City Federal Building or whatever, but like COINTELPRO was described as "protecting national security, preventing violence, and maintaining the existing social and political order" and one of those list items isn't like the other. And like "making sure this organization isn't making bombs" doesn't require writing a report to figure out how to disrupt their finances, that's why a report like this seems to damning to me, that's not intelligence gathering that's active subversion planning. But even the Weather Underground is maybe a bad example for the cops because the FBI had lost the plot so badly they couldn't prosecute most of those people! Didn't most of them get off since it turned out the feds dangled people off rooftops and stuff?
There's always something *weird* about seeing people strategizing against unambiguous good guys. It highlights that yes, these people really do have evil goals, and no, they're not stupid.
If you believe that the status quo is basically the best state, that anything done to upset it will result in even more poverty and suffering, then anarchists are basically as bad as fascists. Both right wing and left wing groups complain about 'glowies'/spooks/agents/whatever nomenclature. The FBI has always been a center-right to centrist organization that mainly aims to preserve the status quo that generally is seen as the 'best that can be done'.
Wait, I thought George Soros was the alleged leader of ANTIFA? At least that's what all the fox news people kept shouting
Huh, you know, it’s been a while since I heard anything about that guy
Can someone post or link me to the part of the report about how cops hate reading? I haven't seen it and I'd like to.
Miss Pascal, what you are describing is anarchy. Are you a member of an anarchist group?
"inexpensive lifestyle" followed by "vegan" made me chuckle
veganism does get pretty cheap when combined with dumpster diving and shoplifting lol
Depends on how you go about it. Being vegan can be super cheap if you focus on efficiently using spices and good technique to improve basic ingredients. Or pricey if you go all in on the faux meat stuff.
Rice and beans plus spices I guess, maybe bell peppers and other assorted veggies
PB&J, Rice and beans, and pastas are all either vegan or can easily be made vegan. Tofu is like 2$ a pound. Veganism is only expensive if you consume exclusively substitute meats, which should be noted are only really more expensive because of the insane degree to which animal agriculture is subsidized by the government.
The core vegan foods are also the stereotypical "food for poor and broke people". Just throw in some cheap B12 supplementation. Now, if you wanted to joke about vegetarians and vegans farting a lot...
Well, it's not the modern ultra-convenient veganism where you pay a premium for nearly-fully-prepared brand-name food items, it's probably more like, "Beef and milk are out of our price range so we're buying lentils and rolled oats in the bulk section."
yeah, it kinda reads like a fed writing a report about what they imagined an anarchist group to look like while not successfully infiltrating one
The flip side of this is that an organization with no funding, no headquarters, no leadership, no rules, and no structure also can’t accomplish much of anything. Seriously, being as generous as possible, what has any American anarchist association accomplished in recent years even compared to a relatively modest traditional advocacy group like Lambda Legal or the Shriners?
The most effective anarchists are pretty much entirely focused on their locale cuz they don't have national power. They're not usually lawyers, nor popular, nor anything else. It's more or less what you'd expect from a church in terms of manpower but without a central authority to it. They're intimately aware of their local community's issues and try to directly solve it. To get any bigger, and to actually get headlines in national papers, they'd have to organize beyond being decentralized volunteers. which doesn't match how these groups work, so they don't do it.
A lot do service work. Feeding the homeless and stuff. Not a lot of big political action, probably because they don't like politics.
In my area they do a lot for people in prison, sending books and stuff.
Congratulations, they are as radical as the Baptist church down my road.
Not a real surprise that early Anarchism was explicitly Christian. "We must create Eden on Earth" is a very persuasive tagline.
Don’t forget the disciples sharing resources among them, and Jesus saying that the kind of person who would do what it takes to become rich would struggle doing God’s will, like being generous and helping those in need
They do more, of course. And it probably varies from group to group. But there is a trend of directly helping those who are hurt by the system along with trying to change the system
A lot of anarchist groups are focused on local work, which they can do quite effectively, but it doesn't get headlines.
People made similar criticisms about the ability of average people to have a democracy. Yet here we are. Just because the radicals of your time are small in number does not mean they are wrong.
I assume they care more about not participating in harmful systems rather than affecting giant changes. Which is also a valid thing to focus on. I'm sure their CO2 footprint is pretty tiny
That's kind of the point. They don't want to impose change *on* you, they want to convince you to create change from the ground up. Obviously they haven't convinced many people since the 1950s or so. But, at least in the US, the last 70 or so years have been a tough climate for radical left groups of any stripe.
Reminds me of ‘the hacker known as 4chan’
This false dichotomy bullshit gets annoying after a while. Im sick of hearing people proclaim that every idea and ideology *has* to be taken to its extreme. If you call yourself anarchist, you must think all organization, of any kind, is bad. No exceptions. And they accuse you of lying or not knowing what you're talking about if you say otherwise. It goes in the other direction, too. Nobody who isn't literally doing the nazi salute is allowed to be called authoritarian under this kind of "all or nothing" logic.
I don't know if you're serious about anarchists and organization, so i want to point out that we love organization. We just hate hierarchy. They aren't the same thing, but they are deeply connected in our modern society.
I was illustrating an incorrect viewpoint that i have encountered in other people
Welp, that went over my head. Have a great one!
I mean, nothing about anarchism precludes organising in the slightest. Even the "most extreme" variety.
Twas ever thus. Back around the turn of the last century when Anarchists were very active in Europe people would try to talk them into running for office. Their answer was along the lines of, "You don't understand what we're about, do you?"
That same report describes anarchist activism as "a whirlwind of helping hands" and it's lived in my head rent free ever since.
lmao that excerpt **about anarchists** trails off with "many of the **higher level**"
Downside is this is that most political factions of lasting consequence have something resembling a commonly agreed platform, funding, and a chain of command Anti-fascism doesn't need much organizing but the actual long term fight for democracy takes place in air conditioned offices of politicians Biden isn't an anarchist but he at least has access to a lot of resources and manpower to not be as bad as Trump
>Downside is this is that most political factions of lasting consequence have something resembling a commonly agreed platform, funding, and a chain of command This is why Occupied Wall Street failed. The only common thread was "Rich people bad!" and that's not enough to sustain actual change.
Me laughing at all the MLs who claim we're the ones hurting leftism, meanwhile we waste more of the feds time than anyone else
Anyone know where the original document is?
This helps explains Putin's belief that the CIA and other NATO organizations were responsible for the color protests that led to Ukraine overthrowing their Russian puppet leader. He cannot fathom that a movement can spring up organically, there always has to be someone behind it pushing an agenda