.mediat// Comparisons Goth sadposting (i'm fine) IdPol Edge Relationship Anarchy as I see it. Nonviolence Every moment is the right moment. On returning to the internet. mindfuck Transformative Justice - a plea for nuance.
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Having a nice visualization session of picturing my every possession and keepsake ravaged by entropy and exposure. Every letter and article of clothing composted, tool rusted, tech waterlogged. Finding peace with ruin is a fantastic exercise.
Comparisons
I haven’t seen anyone do it lately which is nice, but that means it’s a good time to say something so that nobody thinks I’m vagueblogging about them. Sometimes people will do a thing. They’ll try to explain the oppression that any kind of queer people are subjected to, and they’ll compare it to racism, colorism and anti-Blackness. Suffice to say when they do that, it’s difficult to collaborate with and support their project, speaking for myself. Regardless of how well-meaning they believe they’re being, I can hardly think of a better way to make a weak, self defeating point about transphobia and transmisogyny or homophobia. There’s a lot that can be said about why this isn’t just a bad and even harmful strategy, and isn’t as insightful as they think it is, but I’m not gonna write a book about that today. Talking about these things separately or intertwined, and together as part of a larger picture is one thing, but positioning them as metaphors for one another has got some problems. There needs to be a particular language for the particular phenomena.
.mediat//
_<ᴡᴇʟʟ>[ (regard(destable (engaged(adaptogen(generate ((abrupt)distress) )] "==" ((𝙎𝙡𝙞𝙘e𝙐𝙥𝘿𝙞𝙢𝙚𝙣𝙨𝙞𝙤𝙣𝙨)() "o̸͖̤̙̱͎̜͍̼͒̄̓̇̄̏̐͆f̴̣̹̥̫͍̱̺̱͙̰̀͂̈́̔͋͝buttons" ) willing_super𝒸ede) reversefunction) [un／do／/done／/doing／/did] &where &interpret )(([packaged] as a new kind of doomed ᴏɴ) certification [derａnｇing) dangling . boxｅd up and boxed up and impedence.alterations pac ᴀʙᴀɴᴅ ]{} panic() ![`di`/orat/]((hand_blind "ɐ"ｆｕｎｎｅｌ ( SHRIKE-> dart ^^^^^^ ##(like it ᴡᴇʀᴇ)) ## {agor/bereav misinform) time-as-trouble} )[ᴀꜱɪꜰᴛᴏɪᴍᴘᴏꜱᴇᴄᴏᴇʀ ... emergenᴄy] in (the.fishmocks _takes_ 'the.ironfilings' **AND_LOOM** takes as.it |.turnsout |.readout |.blinkout |.freakout? # and ># //░// ████ ▄███▄ █▀███ ▄▄▄ █▓███ ▓████ ># //░// ▒█ ▒ ▒█▀ ▀█ ▓█ ▒█▒ ███▄ ▓█░ █▒ ▓█ ▀ ># //░// ░▓▓▄ ▒▓ ▓█▄░▄█ █ █▄ ▓█░▄█▓ ▒███ ># //░// ▒ ██ ▒▓▄ ▄█ ▒█▀▀█▄ ░█▄▄▄█ ▒█ ▓█ ▄ >#▄//░// ▒██▒ ▓██▀ ░ █ ▒█▒▓█ █ ▒█▒ ░▒████▒ _ _ _ _ _ The making of any choice at all that shifts the trajectory of a world on any scale so much as a pixel in any direction at all, not to enduringly or even noticeably manifest or enact anything in particular but for the gross animal satisfaction of it, so that one’s head doesn’t spontaneously goddamn completely cave in and start sucking one’s surroundings into the wound. Futility as meaningless, irrelevant. Activism as obsessive compulsive micro-adjustments. _ _ _ _ _ Zero stakes - consequence blasted to the four corners, pretension knocked out of one’s mouth like a tooth. Hopelessly, listlessly insistent. An expanding and blindfolded and lidocaine-fueled indifference, shrieking for the sake of it. _ _ _ _ _ Butterflying ineffective out in a shut terrarium; indulgence seeded in heat aroundside of will; forgone pro-clusions in favor of null-gratuity; damned if you don’t, damned if you don’t, damned if you don’t, damned if you don’t, damned if you don’t. Undid there reward. Some encompassed-derived options in return made struck / delineated & spit out unserved & split up – into what? Who gives a fuck. _ _ _ _ _ so what "working" take ..time done instead {how many (in what manner of [was it] then (Take note (applied tree)-> [makes stick to self] instead ^^^^^^^ #for_example[ Rub; Glancing; Sandpaper, Abrais/ion/ed ] / } / | [Con[tactless] --to emerge | [addditive[removal[disavow]]under]] 'a | given? 'tract' undersold& overwritten -f, !appraised &saking for saking &shaken(arrive) FOR '___________________________________________ ___ _ _ __ __ _ _ __ __ __ _ source ⭜⭜⭜⭜⭜top⭜⭜⭜⭜⭜
Goth
Saw someone say “Just as long as they play genuine goth music, not just edgy techno.” on the comments of this video about England’s legendary Slimelight club. It got me thinking about the history of whatever goth means, and it’s not just intersection but fundamental interdependence with drag and transgender expression. The implications of the trans-cyborg subject as well as Fisher’s cybergothic has been explored by those more qualified than me, though. Namely I’ve been thinking about the intervention of technology upon what’s insisted upon to mean traditional within the subculture, as incoherent as that is, as understood by those reproducing goth music, culture, art, literature, theory, and fashion. It made me think of the origins of goth, as far back as Screaming Jay Hawkins, The Doors, Joy Division, and even Sister Rosetta Thorpe creating rock itself, and how things like distortion, telesthesia, electrification, and reverb are the technologies that intervened on the state of things at the time, thus creating new forms. Making fishnet stockings, secondhand clothes, food coloring, lace, or safety pins, as well as all the other trappings of punk and post-punk fashion ever more available (to be re-reproduced and repackaged, over and over, itself toward the moneyed, and the secondhand market of this that keeps the spiral going) to the lowest of classes in certain parts of the world, is something that came about via developing technology, and the capitalist extraction, exploitation, and waste that directed it. Fundamentally goth can be said to have coalesced from cynical disillusionment from something that was itself cynical disillusionment from even older counterculture. The examples abound. Further back even, in terms of name, gothic literature and architecture wherein the cultural movement finds its namesake are also the results of developing technologies, (wherever there is ‘the intrusion of the past upon the present,’ there is also the inverse) as well as their (even further back) turning on the masters and every kind of subversion and resistance. In particular, the notion that techno, industrial music, EBM, synth/futurepop, aggrotech, (now with trap metal, witch house, deathcore, and hyperpop, etc) are “inferior, impure, less goth, poser” music styles and microcultures than post punk, darkwave, and death rock despite obviously having diverse points of origin and influence are nonetheless always perfectly in line with the idea itself. Their artificialities are in no way divergent from or inconsistent with the broader idea. Nyx and I we were talking about this a week or so ago- how goth’s more of just a soul-deep way of being and coping and comprehending being here and now against one’s better judgement, and a stillborn historically occluded thing which dies in order to be, neither fully resurrecting or vanishing, rather than some fixed subculture or even an irredeemable consumer niche, and I think I’ve gotten more fleshed out thoughts on that idea now, at least as it concerns goth kids and technology. Or at least I’ve got some kind of more convincing argument against that pervasive notion of purity. While cutting edge technological interventions have consistently been a part of the thing, I think the idea that an ongoing synthetic or soul-less betrayal of roots presents also as a bizarre fractal conservatism in the scene. Accounting for the conservative attitude in this respect of those who’d be by no stretch conservative in the bigger picture (and some who are, regrettably [who themselves tend to embrace the tech side of it with open arms?]) is fascinating, and seems like some kind of limit to aspire to invalidating somehow. I think it’s worth looking deeper into what motivations and outside influences make it a feature of the people involved. I’d love to hear about other writings that look into this subject and hear other’s takes, because I think this is an under-explored though comparatively unimportant component of the particular subculture at large as it experienced, processed, and understood. It seems to me that on the dirty ground floor, some of the theoretical pseudoluddite dissonance that can be heard is expressed with what’s embedded in this pretentious but ostensibly ‘grounded’ quote, through this lens since it’s expressed not so much as a statement of personal taste, but as a moralism with broader political implications. source ⭜⭜⭜⭜⭜top⭜⭜⭜⭜⭜
sadposting (im fine).
Agonizingly fucking cognizant of the bloody pitiful state of ‘things in general’ in this moment. You name it. Meaninglessness’s meaninglessnessness isn’t providing its usual comfort. Temporality isn’t acting as a thick enough buffer and continuity isn’t anchoring. Maybe it’s the ongoing wild hormone imbalances, maybe it’s the lack of cardio. I could attribute it to the shallow emptiness of thought, and the same of its counterpart in action - or of all possible desires and hopes and wills being wholly, summarily foreclosed materially. The most disturbing part of that is that their foreclosure doesn’t even play into my disaffection. Could be sleep dep, social isolation, alienation from my ideals, lack of control over my own life. Could be I should get my hands on some fun drugs. Feeling loudly feelings I typically feel quietly - like there’s a brand new old kind of fundamentally terrifying no-future ahead, unlike a no-future worth worshiping, - instead a dull, droning, slow burning one that denies everything ecstatic on the face of it. I can’t actually smell blood, and my extremities aren’t actually tingling numb and a little too warm. My skin doesn’t really itch and ache and my body isn’t actually gratefully eating itself - this isn’t ketosis, and I’m not just done riding some traumatic adrenaline high. I’m not in danger. My bones aren’t hollowed out, and I’m not being chased down. If these things were true, I just can’t begin to argue that I’d give two shits. What people value about direction, or about stability, coherence is utterly lost on me right now. It’s a dizzying thing, to be dissociated on some level and excruciatingly present on the same level somehow, and in pain on another and boring in the same. I feel not like I need to grab a weapon and defend myself - but that lack of a survival instinct is more concerning than the need would be. There isn’t anything I’d rather be doing. No colorful adventure, or sharing of experience, exploration. Uninteresting, samey, middle of the road, tepid. All dull at best contrasted with a background of dull at worst. The subject-object has snapped. There’s melancholy, and there’s existential dread, both tried both true classics. Their intersection over breakfast in the afternoon with myself in some kind of blank-walled but otherwise inoffensive open room is the painting I feel like an impression of a background character in, but I’m the frame and I’m the tubes of paint and I’m in the kind of dream where I’m quicksand fighting underwater wearing lead boots, tied up, and all I’m so much as barely trying to do is even pick up the motherfucking paint brush. (Postscript: This passed. I thought it was important to crystallize the feeling at the timeso I could hit it with a hammer later. It can't hurt me anymore.) _ _ _ _ _ It’s been a weirdly long time since I’ve had the living shit kicked out of me, or got in a fuck-your-shit-up violence with some fuck. I’m pretty sure that’s mostly a cool thing, but like also a “oh no am I soft now” thing in another way. How many ways does that relate to depersonalized disconnects from my body or expectations? ----- Guess my last estrogen shot is kicking in. Wee. I’ve been literally experiencing some of the same kinds of emotions I’d be feeling in a situation I’m not in, namely freezing to death; I’m swaddled in thick layers of fabric, concentrating on not concentrating on the experience of being corporeal, appreciating and bemoaning the paradox in numb/sensation. Smells like dissociation fatigue. It’s cold here and I’m trying not to think about it. I’m absent-adjacent, and thawing just enough to spend time scared of squishy crystallizing refrozen tomato frostbite. ⭜⭜⭜⭜⭜top⭜⭜⭜⭜⭜
IdPol
There can’t be many terms which have been so widely and viciously recuperated as well as tautly over-broadened as ‘Identity Politics.’ In the mid-70’s, Black feminist movements wanted terminology to describe certain approaches to resisting white supremacist patriarchal leviathan, and so developed it in overlapping continuity with lesbian activists (though not separatists, whom were critiqued: “Although we are feminists and Lesbians, we feel solidarity with progressive Black men and do not advocate the fractionalization that white women who are separatists demand.”) Namely The Combahee River Collective brought the phrase into use in A Black Feminist Statement, published in ‘Capitalist Patriarchy And The Case For Socialist Feminism’: "The most general statement of our politics at the present time would be that we are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression, and see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking. […] What We Believe: Above all else, our politics initially sprang from the shared belief that black women are inherently valuable, that our liberation is a necessity not as an adjunct to somebody else’s but because of our need as human persons for autonomy. This may seem so obvious as to sound simplistic, but it is apparent that no other ostensibly progressive movement has ever considered our specific oppression a priority or worked seriously for the ending of that oppression. […] Our politics evolve from a healthy love for ourselves, our sisters, and our community which allows us to continue our struggle and work. This focusing upon our own oppression is embodied in the concept of identity politics. […] " This formulation was developed in conversation with the ways marginalized people already lived by mutual aid, solidarity, and affinity. Further reading: Off Our Backs: ‘notes prompted by the national black feminist organization’ Later, Kimberlè Crenshaw (in Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Anti-discrimination Doctrine Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics) would coin and describe ‘intersectionality’ to serve some of uses that I.P. broke ground for, and this concept too has been stretched and warped, albeit to a somewhat lesser extent. " TIME: “You introduced intersectionality more than 30 years ago. How do you explain what it means today? Crenshaw: “These days, I start with what it’s not, because there has been distortion. It’s not identity politics on steroids. It is not a mechanism to turn white men into the new pariahs. It’s basically a lens, a prism, for seeing the way in which various forms of inequality often operate together and exacerbate each other. We tend to talk about race inequality as separate from inequality based on gender, class, sexuality or immigrant status. What’s often missing is how some people are subject to all of these, and the experience is not just the sum of its parts.” Intersectionality, (summarized insufficiently) can be thought of as the practice of paying attention to the synergy which intensifies any oppression that is applied to those categorized by multiple overlapping experiences and social stratifications. Most pointedly it’s what happens to a person when they are not only a member of one marginalized community, but also a woman; or are also Black. Intersectional analysis and activism is aware and critical of social and political structures that ensure that anyone whose experience is not simply multiply marginalized, but something altogether more intense, compounding, more complex. From the practice of this analysis we get words like misogynoir, describing the unique process of prejudice, compartmentalization, violence, and marginalization experienced by Black women in particular - and beyond this, transmisogynoir. IdPol can be thought of in many ways, but was forged in the same literature, and for similar reasons as this arguably slightly less blurry and manipulated notion. It’s a framework that seeks to destroy itself, to make obsolete the need for itself by rendering extinct the power dynamics created through racist, ableist, or sexist domination put into play by dominating populations. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: "The laden phrase “identity politics” has come to signify a wide range of political activity and theorizing founded in the shared experiences of injustice of members of certain social groups. Rather than organizing solely around belief systems, programmatic manifestos, or party affiliation, identity political formations typically aim to secure the political freedom of a specific constituency marginalized within its larger context. Members of that constituency assert or reclaim ways of understanding their distinctiveness that challenge dominant characterizations, with the goal of greater self-determination. […]" "[It] is also something of a philosophical punching-bag for a variety of critics. Often challenges fail to make sufficiently clear their object of critique, using “identity politics” as a blanket description that invokes a range of tacit political failings." As Sonia Kruks puts it: “What makes identity politics a significant departure from earlier, pre-identarian forms of the politics of recognition is its demand for recognition on the basis of the very grounds on which recognition has previously been denied: it is qua women, qua blacks, qua lesbians that groups demand recognition. The demand is not for inclusion within the fold of “universal humankind” on the basis of shared human attributes; nor is it for respect “in spite of” one’s differences. Rather, what is demanded is respect for oneself as different (2001: 85).” When it comes to practice, these approaches can materialize in terms of social organization, ecology, and law. With respect to indigenaety, steweardship and dispossession and example is as follows, found in the same entry: Taiaiake Alfred, in his defense of a return to traditional Indigenous values, argues that: “Indigenous governance [sic] systems embody distinctive political values, radically different from those of the mainstream. Western notions of domination (human and natural) are noticeably absent; in their place we find harmony, autonomy, and respect. We have a responsibility to recover, understand, and preserve these values, not only because they represent a unique contribution to the history of ideas, but because renewal of respect for traditional values is the only lasting solution to the political, economic, and social problems that beset our people. (Alfred 1999: 5)” "Critical engagement with the origins and conceptualization of subjectivity also informs poststructuralist challenges to identity politics. They charge that it rests on a mistaken view of the subject that assumes a metaphysics of substance—that is, that a cohesive, self-identical subject is ontologically (if not actually) prior to any form of social injustice (Butler 1999 [1990]).[…]" "Since its 1970s origins, identity politics […] has undergone numerous attacks by those motivated to point to its flaws […]. For many l eftist commentators, in particular, identity politics is something of a bête noire, representing the capitulation to cultural criticism in place of analysis of the material roots of oppression. […] Identity politics, for these critics, is both factionalizing and depoliticizing, drawing attention away from the ravages of late capitalism toward superstructural cultural accommodations that leave economic structures unchanged. […] (McNay, Kumar, Fraser)" When IdPol is invoked or picked up and weaponized (for good or evil), it often diverges starkly from this dangerous, revolutionary, and liberatory historical grounding, it popularly is forced to refer to the idea that anybody who experiences some marginalization is inherently an authority - while this is certainly true when it comes to authorship and expertise around the nature of any given person’s own experience, the assertion that IdPol maintains that some marginalization imbues generalized authority is pernicious enough a misappropriation of the term to have done enduring harm to its use. The arguments that stem from that focused, intentional misuse have gained widespread adoption and have not rarely overshadowed its deeper, more useful meaning. The project of distorting its meaning have been not only successes for the silencing projects of white supremacist patriarchy, but this altered meaning has even gone so far as to be useful again to those who are critical of the process of categorization to which capitalists subject us in order to build marketing niches, algorithms, and consumer identities for the sake of profit and growth. I’m not in a position to consider the phrase ‘lost’, nor do I intend to try to encourage that. If we accept that words don’t mean things, (they only suggest them) then it’s probably the case that it’s important to accept that a term’s use, however holistically distorted and projected, is practically its meaning, and so we’re left with a contradiction - a phrase that effectively means different things depending on context and reader. So I’d maintain that as wise as it is to comprehend “identity politics” to be used to point at or even justify the strawman: “only the most marginalized in any given situation have authority to speak (over others) on anything and everything.” This sort of thing is truly more soberly represented in Sandra Harding, Dorothy Smith, Martin Nakata, and Donna Haraway‘s use of Standpoint Theory. Nakata: “It would […] begin from the premise that my social position is discursively constituted within and constitutive of complex set of social relations as expressed through social organization of my every day […]” [This is an entry point very much worth investigating.] Other narratives include the anti-solidarity: “members of any given in-group should only organize with or trust one another, and cultivate antagonism with all others” or “One’s entire self is easily summarized by what one buys, or how one is hurt” or something even more inverted and absurd like “one’s actual political positions aren’t as important or worthy of consideration as their belonging to a marginalized group,” or even “oh no reverse-racism blah blah dogshit pls shoot me,” it’s very, very wise not to throw away its other, older referents which emphasize solidarity. This is short, and oversimplified, and relies pretty heavily on a familiarity with an also occluded notion of intersectionality to flesh out much of what IdPol means. There are plenty of ways this new post-2016 IdPol, and even it’s recuperation is used to silence informed people’s experience, and I’ve neglected much of this. It’s crucial not to leave it here. I’m asking others if they would like to expand and clarify things I’ve left out, or to suggest directions of inquiry to explore together, or to ask honest and vulnerable questions that I might not remotely be able to answer. source ⭜⭜⭜⭜⭜top⭜⭜⭜⭜⭜
Edge
Damn. Bitches feel like they need like twelve layers of irony and "kek you can't tell what I really mean, so I'm gonna genuinely reproduce some fash shit on the surface" just to not feel fear and vulnerability. I'm not from twitter so I'm not used to it, I guess? I feel ok looking down on that kinda sad shit. I don't need that. That shit seeps into the brain and stops being playacting before long. Like god damn dude talk about how you feel say what you mean. That layer of armor you think you're rocking only works on yourself. It just makes you look like a prick. I'm nothing if not a pedantic tryhard autistic fag with a fetish for complaining and god forbid cringe, k, but I just don't think it ought to be all that controversial to say that jokes should be... funny? Like I'm not standing here hyping up mainstream liberal 'sjw' virtue signalling 'cancel culture' cop in your head shit, here but I do have values that I do actually care about, and one of them is that people should in general have values that they care about, even if absolutely jaded desolate hopelessness is one of them. I'm not even vagueposting to change people here. I'm just venting cause it's in my head. Dig this: Jreg is funny, yall. To be just like your favorite youtuber Jreg you gotta actually be fucking funny, yall... I don't have any drive to watch some stranger's self-driven descent into any death cult. I've got no desire at all to find entertainment in someone being socially coerced into committing to climbing into a mental and political bottomless pit. There's heinous stuff on the internet I can seek out if I want to - people being wrong, lying, doing harm, tying themselves into whackjob knots, immersing themselves in all kinds of viscous semiotic acids. I can do that kinda self-harm to myself by looking for it if I like, and I have. I spent a long goddamn time with that kind of stuff taking up all the free space in my head. I've gotten from that experience what I needed, and I don't need to beat that dead horse, it's dull. I'm not hurt by someone being a ~spicy neoliberal~ at me, I'm bored to death by it - especially when they dress it up as something deeper. I get it already. I'm never, ever gonna be some fucking repressed blonde bro transmisogynist waffen cosplayer's savior - I'm not gonna show him no damn light. Me arguing or interacting with those kinds of hopeless fucks isn't resistance, it's just a real, real questionable source for a hit of dopamine. There's way too much cool, interesting, informative, meaningful, fun things and people on the internet to be spending any more time than is strictly necessary thinking about and interacting with that fucked gang of greyfaces that run the world anyway. I'm weaker to be to that mind virus that says "nah u gotta feed the troll" than I wish I was. I think I'm at least a little ahead of the curve but I'm still not satisfied with the fucks I wind up giving and the psychic real estate that takes up. Hospitalizing a nazi irl or straight up ruining one's life online is one thing, but letting one live rent free in my head, and buy my time for free is another. Better out than in. ⭜⭜⭜⭜⭜top⭜⭜⭜⭜⭜
Relationship Anarchy as I see it.
I feel like talking about R.A., cos some people have asked me about it in the past few weeks. This is my practice, my political point of view and it aligns with what I demand to see from the world. As it pertains to me, I’ll say I’m not interested in a lot of the kinds of relationships that prevail in the collective consciousness as being of elevated importance. This framework fits me, in my particularities, including my celibacy and relative facets of social isolation. It seems to me that RA should be what you make of it. I’m gleefully discarding any baggage that doesn’t serve me here, and outwardly advocating the premises I’m using to formulate this. My contact with what’s been written on the subject has led me to believe these things. I’m not saying anything new here, not breaking any ground, all of these points are already spoken about more eloquently than I can put them. I’d take in interest in how much further these ideas can be taken, though. If the ideology is what you make of it, as I’m asserting, then it’s when you don’t believe in or act out narratives sold to you about how different kinds of relationships have to work. You intentionally relate to others as agents on a case by case basis. If you didn’t have a say in constructing or at least radically interpreting a narrative, there’s good reason to resist being bound or even guided by it. What Relationship Anarchy wants to be, it’s most important values, include rejecting the assertion that relationships need to escalate over time and not elevating live-in or sexual partners, (or whoever) over others in some hierarchy, by default. It comes without rules that you don’t consent to. The prevailing ideology in monogamous and polyamorous structures aren’t in ready alignment with these principles, so I find reason to object to them. This is a political opinion that I have about the way that people should be working toward relating to each other on a very fundamental level. I’m interested in maximizing concentrated love, solidarity, comradery, friendship and every other relation of equals in a robust, distributed, stable, redundant way, without assumptions. The idea that love or time is a scarce or finite resource is poison. It’s not to make some kind of judgement about a minimum number of people someone should be close to, just that there should be no maximum, and that care shouldn’t be reserved and withheld out of pretense. I’m specifically not saying “everyone should have at least 3 partners!” instead I’m asserting that a partner or companion or soulmate or co-conspirator is whatever someone makes of it, and that relationship shouldn’t need to be hierarchically more important than anyone else for no good reason, and without long-sought continual agreement. I’m demanding Affinity Groups or bust in all areas of life. There’s no lack of objections to non-monogamy. This isn’t about non-monogamy, but is much more importantly a more holistic framework to begin from. It does not need to have anything to do with romance or sex or anything in particular, but some of those objections have to do with romantic jealousy, even among the non-monogamous, as well as jealousy that has nothing to do with romance or anything like that either. There’s nothing wrong with feeling insecure but in my political opinion, the prescribed practice of unified dependence on one (or even two or more!) other person(s), with near to a single point of failure isn’t robust, and the narrative that underpins it is ethically bankrupt nonsense, and it only leads to fragility. The assumption that this is normal or good is something worth examining. It’s repugnant to my values to allow feelings of insecurity that fester into jealousy compel one into coercing someone else into some set of behaviors. Jealousy is a human thing. It’s not necessarily evil. It’s good because It’s an indicator, it means something. To have the pretense that some feeling should necessarily restrict someone else instead of just prompting an ongoing free and open conversation about feelings like that is not acceptable. Values shouldn’t be imposed in this way - there needs to be a discussion and a consensus. It is imperative that jealousy that stems from feelings of entitlement or ownership be thoroughly addressed and deprogrammed. It’s the premise that it’s imperative to know one’s feelings and to communicate them to others, and set up clear boundaries and expectations. To have jealousy dictate force or otherwise coerce another are not terms which I accept. It’s about asserting defensible freedom, in the egoist sense, where a free association can be severed without harm at any point, which itself depends on a robust and caring network of networks of people. If there weren’t a lot more to say about all this there wouldn’t be volumes of writing already done about it, so I’ll cut off my two cents here. ⭜⭜⭜⭜⭜top⭜⭜⭜⭜⭜
Nonviolence
I’m seeing a couple of threads going on about stuff relating to this, so rather than tag onto both, I figure I’d put my two cents here. I’ve been studying nonviolence, and the related subjects of mediation / conflict resolution and transformation, political theories of action and similar topics for decades, for near the second half of that time I’ve viewed nonviolence with a more sharply critical eye than the first period, in which I was a strict adherent. I’m of the opinion that the well worn approach that is a diversity of tactics is reliably the correct approach to the question. It seems to me that the most effective utilization of a nonviolent approach is born from personal conviction, awareness of personal position and access to leverage and becomes much less effective as a evangelist mission. Violence on the other hand is the kind of inevitability that requires no fundamental theoretical underpinning to be created but instead particular organizational and strategic deployment, but often manifests in a beautiful, meaningful, and helpful free-form structure-less chaotic way. It’s worth noting this is not “violence toward windows or profits.” I dismiss this discourse out of hand, but instead mean violence that includes verbal, structural, social and physical violence. For anyone who is committed primarily to only one of these two extremes to advocate for their position in general is a fantastic thing, but for the same to do so at the opposed camp generally does one of two things, depending on how it’s done: it can broaden the other’s horizon and expand their toolbox or it can alienate and seem to de-legitimize contributions toward common goals made under each approach. There are at least two admirable points of view here: that violence should exist alongside diverse nonviolent actions, and inversely that nonviolence is one tool that should be available to those unafraid of, willing to participate in, enthusiastic about or committed to violence - not some sign of weakness. Being well trained in both fields, and able to take a fluid approach to action is certainly an asset to anyone interested in resisting being subjected to the violence of leviathan. I have to grimace about this being understood as a more or less pseudo-centerest or like middle of the road stance here, but what I’m really advocating is to take a healthy scoop form both extremes, rather than find some middling compromise. To be sure there are misinterpretations of ‘total destroy now’ and ‘militant pacifism’ that wind up looking more like deadly misanthropy toward the most vulnerable, and self-congratulatory moralizing and sabotage of those with whom solidarity should exist, or useless liberal posturing or LARPing. One of the biggest criticisms of nonviolents is that they sometimes presuppose that the mission of nonviolence is to prevent others from engaging in violence, especially supposed allies. This simply is not the case. such manifestations, I think, aren’t anything but absurd to include in a dialogue as legitimate. The straw men are sitting right there in flesh and blood, doing these things in reality, and are no minority in terms of those who employ these tactics, so I can only dismiss them as not actually employing the positions they seem to embody. Criticizing those employing a strategy wrongly and then calling it a criticism of that strategy might not be the way to go. There are two major relatively contemporary tracts that I’d like to highlight which do some justice to this subject, Gelderloos’ classic How Nonviolence Protects the State, and a response to this How Nonviolence is Misrepresented both are worthy of critique. There is also Zinn’s The limits of Nonviolence(1968) and IGD’s Strict Nonviolence v. Diversity of Tactics(2020) These all go into a lot more depth on the subject than would make sense for me to do here. ⭜⭜⭜⭜⭜top⭜⭜⭜⭜⭜
Every moment is the right moment.
No moment is the wrong moment. There are no exceptions. All instances contained all future instances. All prior ones contain nothing. Set what will be set fire on new fire for each new fire that can be set. It is never about hope. Everything that ever was will always be. Everything that will ever be isn’t yet. This isn’t fluid or stable or real or here or there. We can only ever be un-quantified facets of each other. Perfect hopelessness excuses and textures nothing. That context provides emptiness, convincing, assuring, complete. Urgency never changed. Involvement never shifted. Conditions were never altered. The ‘way things aren’t’ and ‘everything else’ are non-different. Not having done that which ought to have been done, and then upon realization, not doing that which had ought to have been done is the only undoing to do. Doing our best better be what we were already doing. Everyone already knows like second nature that the future is a Product with a price, available for a limited time at select retailers. The generic brand is sold out, and it’s got a lot of weird ingredients in it anyway. There are valuables in the car that make leaving the parking lot scary. In plain sight too. They’re getting hot to the touch in the sun, sticking to the seats. It’s locked. There’s this equation in us that tips out when it gets bad enough. The equals sign snaps in half and everyone gets corrected. The loss and the gain double up over and over, and even though the safety glass does break, the shards get replaced after falling into some birthday cake. The future is not the punchline. Nobody ever gave a fuck about a point. Alienated and willful. Staring right into that eye that’s a mouth that knows that does not blink and won’t blink back. Existential cognizance to that belittled underlying. Infinitesimal reaction to each and every one. Arguable. To destroy as a means of Sliding into an ‘out of it’. Radio silence, self defeated dirk or dagger resultant backsplashthat’s inevitable. What’s my own approach? source ⭜⭜⭜⭜⭜top⭜⭜⭜⭜⭜
On returning to the internet.
I wonder if XNFM is gonna be the *social media platform* that'll break my habit of defaulting to a reclusive self conscious state of digital isolation. I don't necessarily have or need a clear picture at this point in my life of what I want out of the experience of microblogging or whatever else this could be interpreted as - it could be a outward facing diary or a line to others' experience and understandings or a masturbatory reification of what I crave to be understood about my identity and values, or a manifested denial of my anxieties related to the people-parts of the internet. I haven't been much for idly posting anything in years, but variety is tasty. I'm down? I think a lot about how consuming relates to this kind of thing. I feel not-real-good about creating something just for someone to consume as a matter of course - in like a "content" sense. I like to think I take pause in general before consuming anything. In most internet spaces, this impulse is pretty well justified in terms of the marketing and advertising and brand-building going on. Thinking about consuming being the main language could be a convoluted, backward way of interpreting vulnerable digital socializing that results from all kinds of the inevitable traumas of this and that. I know that consuming something isn't a sinful nasty evil. I'm hounded by second-guessing myself, though even here in a space about explicit insecurity. The self consciousness kicks in now that I'm putting it out there like this. I wind up convinced it seems I think I'm putting down "the philosophy of posting - my very important musings that other people need to read", right now but knowing that train of thought is just a pointless spiral,prompts me to try to investigate the narrative that brings me there, and makes me feel like I can't get what other people seem to get from the internet of people, or that I'm right to be afraid or dismissive. source ⭜⭜⭜⭜⭜top⭜⭜⭜⭜⭜
mindfuck
Had a satisfying thought on some full-bore freight train sleep-dep the other day. Praxis is being as viciously, horrifically transphobic as humanly possible toward even slightly fuckbrain cisgender people - insisting, violently, that they are the ones who are transgender and that you’re not, calling them liars when they deny it. I mean fucked up, genuinely, hurtful. Screaming over-the top trans-hating at them, not flipping it and being like ‘cIsPhObIc,’ but quoting every godawful thing you’ve ever heard word for word without irony. Re-weaponized gaslighting. Redirected reproduction of trauma. Turkey Curse on Schedule 1 drugs. Horn them armed into those cognitively dissonant shoes with unyielding belligerence. Like… I just even wanna see a skit of this or something. source ⭜⭜⭜⭜⭜top⭜⭜⭜⭜⭜
re: Transformative Justice - a plea for nuance.
tl;dr Despite what you have heard, Transformative justice is about making the world not horrid so that people don't to horrid shit. Reading time -10 mins. We all need to collectively figure out how to address harm, and always will. There are already a huge number of researched approaches to do that. The approach I mesh with the best, and that I've see the best results out of is Transformative Justice. TJ isn't flawless - but I'm convinced it's pretty damn good. I want to describe some facets of how I interpret and put into action the values and processes laid out in this approach. Versatility is one of it's greatest attributes, along with its application in a litany of fields. There are a number of ways to interpret and implement the approach. This multitude of ways is a feature. Thinking through the interpretations of what it can entail is a part of the process. Another critical part of the process is to actually remake reality into one where the machinations of the process are more and more possible, which is to say that the structural and cultural fuck shit that causes people to be awful can get destroyed directly, and in the mean time as mitigated and limited as possible. I should be clear in saying that I'm not a "this shitlord here is a fucking asshole monster and should be shot posthaste -- abolitionist" by any stretch of the imagination. It's a misreading to be convinced I am personally always against or for that. Without any doubt, it should go without saying that an informed shorthand term wrought from convenience for, "someone has done harm" is "abuser." I'm not naively attempting to intervene in practical language, but instead implication and connotation. I'm getting ahead of certain critiques here. Taking for granted that it's always an informed shorthand acts sometimes like a mistake. The origin and meaning of that shorthand winds up lost when not kept ready at hand. Declaration of identity, done this way, can be syntactically dubious, and results in confabulation of behavior and patterns thereof. It's an old adage at this point to refer to the difference between the act and the actor. In my opinion, the jacket of "bad person" can often be a useful, but more often, possibly misleading point of analysis. Someone doesn't need to be in all ways simply equal to this identity to qualify as someone who has abused and one doesn't need to be reduced to this name to be held wholly accountable for harm (whatever that needs to mean, in any instance). Any synonym for abuser, bad person, scumbag, et cetera is a identity - an identification, a diagnosis of substance that's woven into the fabric of its subject. It's not fiction, but it's not immutable and encompassing, and it must not be misunderstood to be. The impulse to punish, destroy, to take generalized and specified violent righteous indignation and allow that and that alone to guide a process of comprehending and addressing harm isn't good enough or effective enough for me to throw my lot in with it alone or primarily. The race to be the most merciless as a matter of course isn't a race I'm interested in reproducing in seclusion. I need to say here that I am not condemning this approach, I'm also not saying that I don't love and appreciate it, or that I don't have it near the top of my toolbox. I am saying that it isn't the only and isn't always the most effective approach. The further alienation of a perpetrator of harm is nothing to desire. Much good can be got from the collaboration that can come from an abuser. Closely, none of this is to say that it's ever or always inappropriate to torture a serial rapist, capitalist, war criminal, serial murderer (four favorite examples) to death (or for that matter to take a different approach). I need to locate myself here, as a defense against the very misunderstandings I'm railing against. I have much more of an objection to the state getting in the way of justice than I have with justice. Kindness to a perpetrator of harm is not relevant or prescribed here, it's entirely besides the point. I have also an objection to one size fits all configurations of justice. Justice is what those involved come to consensus about it being. Everything is (inasmuch as 'is' is a coherent word) what those involved come to consensus about. It's problematic for our entire understanding of that which should be condemned about those four identities to be holistically encompassing of these individuals or structures. It's the behavior, not the actor that's being responded to. The force, not the individual. It's the history, not the inherent being that's being prevented from continuing its inertia. To presume oneself ever able to respond directly to an actor is itself incoherent, imo. This is all to set up a premise for diving deeper into understanding the approach Transformative Justice takes to harm. TJ, by its essential nature includes anything that alters the configuration of the situation that facilitated harm. Someone engaged with TJ does not attempt to transform the actor directly - as though one somehow had a backdoor control panel into the actor's habits through punitive or coercive measures. It does not attempt to transform a monster into an angel, or to coddle the monster. This is a horrifying misinterpretation. I affirm the source and cause of the bad acting is 'nurture', rather than 'nature', in keeping with the separation of act and actor. This, in my opinion and experience is actionable and powerful, especially when there's access to altering those conditions. I do not accept that some people are inherently evil, just that many are trained and reinforced by their awful habits. Many are so reinforced in those habits that they reproduce them. Many are committed at all costs to this reproduction, and have caused such reprehensible suffering as to need to induce unyielding intolerance. Dismissing the notion that there's such a category as inherently 'born to be evil' is in my opinion a baseline axiom - a starting place that if skipped, can lead to some severely harmful absurdities. What are the conditions that facilitate abuse? Sometimes apathetic tolerance for the abuser's behaviors within a community can facilitate further abuse. Often it's the interpersonal abuse the perpetrator has internalized and reproduced. More examples include economic factors, racism, misogyny, or simply being embedded in an abusive culture - the list is as long as the degree of zoom one needs to put on it. Addressing relations to the root causes of the behavior, as well as changing those roots are the primary aims. This is to say nothing so far of the therapy, vindication, healing, moving on, vengeance or anything of the sort to do with a wronged party. I'd like to avoid anachronism. What's done isn't undone, but instead understood, re-experienced, addressed, interpreted, even amplified. TJ attempts to deal with conditions that allow the reproduction of harm - future harm, and may incidentally produce desirable results for the harmed party as it effects future experiences and interpretations of past ones. It's not TJ's primary motivation to address, or the harmed party, or even the harming party, but instead take into serious consideration the narrativization of the harmed party as a way to as fully as possible, understand the processes and events at hand. TJ cannot preclude, define, or disregard the response impulses a survivor or community has. It attempts to understand change the conditions that facilitates the behavior. I'm writing this as a plea, I'm someone who has been involved in the study of these approaches as well as many others for some significant time, and I've been unable to ignore a widely propagated misunderstanding of the premises of TJ. It is not Restorative Justice, nor is it purely a righteous embodiment of rage against structural evils (those are indispensable, critical, crucial, but not identical). It's not cancelling. It's not especially kind or caring, concerned primarily with changing the behaviors of an abuser, but it is holistic and nuanced, and shockingly effective and in tune with the sorts of radical anarchist values I appreciate when practiced by an informed community. Finally I realize that groups of people have done all sorts of obscure and absurd 'accountability' rituals and stuck on the label of 'Transformative Justice.' I have no way of being concerned with that, except to resist it. I'm describing and defending exactly what I am defending and describing, not those disparate rituals that any number of ignorant pretenders have advertised under the name. It's worth being unambiguous about this distinction. I would deeply love to talk more about this, to be given the opportunity to ask questions and answer them in turn, and to widely disseminate a constant dialogue about this thing that's on the shortlist of "things that might save us." ⭜⭜⭜⭜⭜top⭜⭜⭜⭜⭜
If you read all that, tell me so. I'm not hard to get in touch with.