You’re not teaching the world that your position or your values are superior. You’re teaching the world that the way to resolve conflict is with violence that is cold, meticulous, calculated, and overwhelming. That’s a dangerous sword to carry, friends. Hold tight to the hilt, lest it turn toward you.
The concepts of “we” and “us” were transitioned from descriptors of family or local grouping into abstract, nationalist concepts applied to everyone with citizenship in the state on behalf of the holders of extreme wealth. This was true even prior to the development of capitalism. It was not some leap in human sociology. Rather, it was an innovation in the science of subjugation and the preemption of the individual will to that of those with the most wealth. There is no “we,” no “us.” There is only relative wealth, those who are registered slaves to its will, and those it deems irrelevant to its needs who it murders. You owe states nothing. They are simply gangs of well-heeled criminals who pay men and women with guns to ensure your compliance. If you care more about a piece of paper and a flag than you do about people, they own you, body and soul. You have joined their cult in your heart. You are their thing. “We” is the people who take care of us, and the people we take care of. “Us” is all living things in a universal family, not some nationalist hierarchy of theft.
You right-wing folk do realize that if you do, somehow, manage to destroy democracy for good, we’re not just gonna lay down and die, right? Like, you think the lefties are insufferable right now? Wait until we don’t have a political process. It’s not your intimidating demeanor that keeps us at bay. It’s our hope that things can be made better through peaceful means. You go ahead and take that away from us, and see what happens. Fuck around, and find out.
And how-here-is-here,
placed-between-parentheses,
of fate’s-coiled-function.
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– achrilock
Also, I’m tired of fucking around on Youtube looking for a song or a movie clip, and half of it is chains of white supremacist and conspiracy theory rabbit holes, or bait channels that lead to that shit, or some far-right state propaganda. Tired of being on social media and having to check a thousand years of post history to make sure you all aren’t fucking horrible filthy gas station bathroom creatures trying to indoctrinate morons to whatever fucked up bullshit your pathetic horrid little gray matter subscribes to before I like or reblog anything, ‘cause if you get that shit wrong here come the fucking posturing white knights to put another notch on their belts because allies are disposable. Like, seriously, sometimes I wish a fucking asteroid would liquefy the surface of this planet. Also, if you think I’m shit? If somebody told you I was shit? If you heard from your girlfriend’s boyfriend’s hamster that I’m not a good person?Find the fucking block button and use that shit. Eat my ass. Have a nice day, or burn in the Hell of your own pathetic posturing stupidity. Totally your call. ☺
If you’d grow tall, lines of insects stand astride,
for small-as-small, among such-walls-skies as wide.
And growth-as-grand-or-gnat-gain-spark-gave in kind,
with upturned-eyes-upon horizons-heart and mind.
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– achrilock
I honestly believe that humanity as an Anthropocene species is probably doomed. We’ll survive in some form, probably, but not in a contiguous era analogous to the present one moving forward into the future. I say this because human communities, be they authoritarian, neoliberal, anarchic, or interpersonal, more often than not do not self-select for actual merit when choosing practical decisionmakers. More often than not they select for arbitrary traits based on subconscious desire, or even more frequently they select the best performers, the best social liars. And the systems that presently dominate the world exacerbate these self-selecting errors. And the problem is compounded by the follower human impulse to conform, and to attack, based upon arbitrary criteria, anyone who does not conform, and thus the flawed systems are preserved and strengthened. We are monkeys still scrambling for feathers to put in our hair, or shiny rocks to string around our necks, always ready to exhibit sexual prowess, either practically or abstractly, as a means of social dominance. We don’t select for wisdom or ability. We select for our subjective, flawed models of what wisdom and ability look like. And then the masses dutifully follow. And, thus, it is only a matter of time before a beautiful liar leaps from a cliff that is too high, and takes human civilization with them.
So, let’s have a little talk about Tim Scott.
For those who are unaware, Tim Scott is a South Carolina Senator who recently gave a rather batshit, Christian nationalist, reactionary oration as rebuttal to Joe Biden’s speech before the Congress this week. He has since drawn criticism from progressives and from the left, with people referring to him as ‘Uncle Tim’ or an ‘Oreo,’ both pejoratives meant to indicate that he is a black person who champions white values and intentions over the liberation of people from his own ethnicity.
I can’t revoke Tim Scott’s black person card, because, as I said yesterday in an unrelated matter, while I know what it is to be part of a genetic minority and while I’ve faced many of the same interpersonal and systemic challenges as a black person, I ain’t black. So that’s between black folks and Scott. What I will say, though, is that when I saw that speech my first thought was ‘this guy is a hypocrite and he is betraying any kind of liberative agenda.’ I didn’t tweet it out or participate in the ‘Uncle Tim’ shenanigans because, believe it or not, my dickhead meter does have a red line and sometimes I actually notice when the needle’s about to hit it. I do think the same thing, however, every time I see Michael Steele (former Republican National Committee chairman) on NBC talking about what it means to him to be a black conservative (translation, a black reactionary helping to oppress people from his own ethnicity by trying to redeem what has been, for decades, a proto-fascist, white supremacist political party).
So, after all of this happened on social media, MSNBC commentators swooped in, last night, to decry the ‘race traitor’ language. People in the neoliberal press started writing hot takes about how people can’t stand a black conservative, about how the left is out of control etc, etc. I don’t think that quite captures the crux of the issue, though. I think that’s a very typical establishment response to criticism of the establishment. I think it was a bit of a self-serving, coordinated hit job. What do I mean by this?
You see this reaction by the mainstream often, and typically it is directed at liberative voices on social media in a very derisive and dismissive way. There’s a lot of language about ‘crossing the line’ and ‘mutual respect’ and ‘civility.’ The reason this happens is that the paid commentators and the sociopolitical brokers of the world, who have access to platforms more expansive and far-reaching than a tweet, are, liberal or conservative or overtly fascist, at their core reactionary forces. You see this in NBC’s ‘conservative curious’ atmosphere (even while the country was slipping into fascism because of that party and that way of thinking). You see it in the mainstream media’s continuous embrace of liberal narratives of false equivalence. This logical fallacy that people who want to use the status quo to oppress people and people who want to overturn the status quo to liberate people can somehow meet at some mystical, morally supreme ‘middle,’ if only all the radicals can be silenced and everyone can learn to get along (looking at you, Barack Obama…).
And when voices of liberation see someone used in a token manner (because that’s what people like Tim Scott and Michael Steele are, whether they understand that or not, tokens) it is disheartening to them because they understand the propaganda value of that move, as do the reactionaries masquerading as woke in those anchor chairs and behind those editorial desks. The mainstream, liberal or conservative, center prides itself on sociopolitical stasis, on tranquility and order at the cost of justice. In fact, their social, political, and economic positions rely on that kind of anti-revolutionary position. Same as it did during the time of slavery, when people in nice clothes said there had to be a way to compromise the slaveholder and abolitionist position. Same as when there were Jewish people who collaborated with and informed to the Nazis, because something about impolite conflict just didn’t sit right with them, because they hoped they could maintain their positions in whatever order followed.
So, I can’t confiscate these guys’ black dude cards. But I can point out that the corporate coalition in this country, which has allowed and enabled fascist activities and policies, which has used the narrative of token oppressors to marginalize voices of genuine liberation, and which continues to tell their own ‘big lie’ that there is a middle ground between exploitation and liberation, only cares about civility when their own agenda or behavior or operatives are criticized. They react in the way they have reacted because liberative rhetoric is dangerous to all of these people and the positions they hold as representatives of an exploitative, propagandistic order, and because, deep down, a lot of these people, politicians, copy writers, correspondents, and anchors, understand that they are functionaries in a system that does not care about liberation, of black people or of anyone else. They understand that they are capitalism’s pet prisoners, overseeing those who might generate actual resistance and imposing cognitive, emotional, and practical boundaries on folks with a true liberative agenda, on behalf of the people paying their salaries. I’m not saying they’re all bad. They aren’t. Not even the tokens. A lot of them do fantastic work, and are tremendous professionals. But they are participants in a reactionary oppressive agenda, and that shows through most when they use that vast media machine to criticize people for calling out what is essentially hypocritical, propagandistic nonsense.
So, it’s for black people to say how black Tim Scott is. But I can certainly safely call him an asshole, and I can share some of that glory with all of the people defending his right to be an oppressor from an oppressed group of people.
Not your tormentors, and not your doom,
only a conscience, which but you soothe.
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– achrilock
The fact that liberals are making waves on climate policy is a good thing. But there are a few things that the optimistic headlines aren’t telling you. First, and foremost, you cannot reconcile a reduction in both emissions and overall resource usage / traditional pollution within a finite living physical system with an infinite growth paradigm. It’s illogical. It’s a fantasy of the oligarchs, and politicians who smile too much, that they can put batteries in cars and plant a few forests and keep on with business as usual.
Second, these ambitious programs are going to a) cost a lot of money / human resources, and b) lead to further resistance from entrenched economic class interests. To the first point, they’re depending on an economic recovery in the coming years (growth) to swell the budget to the extent that it will pay for these initiatives. Even if that were to happen as they project, which is unlikely over the long term because the American political system is a dumpster fire, that would mean that they’re going to need to continue to put the burden of all of this on workers and exploited externalities in the economic system itself. So, you’re gonna be working in your green workplace and making $8 an hour with no health insurance or pension, and the Wall Street / finance sector would be integral as a revenue stream to this project, so that means continued instability and inequity within the overall system. It means more ‘too big to fail,’ meaning immune to any kind of real reform. Which leads us to our next point.
People are saying that there is a consensus, now. That reactionary positions on climate are dinosaurs waiting for the bureaucratic state’s asteroid. They’re saying that anti-climate-reform voices are so irrational that they are rendering themselves extinct. That’s what they said about racists. That’s what they said about fascists. That’s what they said about colonial invasions. It wasn’t true in that context, and it’s not true within the context of climate reform. There are ALWAYS people willing to screw everyone else on the planet over for five minutes of gratification or for a dollar more than their neighbor. There are people in very fine clothing who would eat you in front of your family for the small amount of money in your pocket, if it wasn’t against the law. And there are always people, liberal or reactionary, who are willing to facilitate that on some level for their own social, political, or economic gain. These people are the ones with legislative and judicial authority in the government, and with the financial influence over the same. These are the people with real power. And in a few years, they’ll worm (or coup) their way back into executive power, if we don’t change the system. If a fascist wins in 2024, he or she will take every bit of Biden climate reform and erase it, thus dooming the world.
You absolutely cannot rely on the political or economic systems as they exist today to solve this climate problem, the issue of police murder, militarism more broadly, economic inequality, or fascist reaction, because it is a system that was built upon and built for perpetual exploitation. It’s set up to maintain that. And that system spread throughout the world during the twentieth century. And there are factions within that system, within business, within finance, within the Democratic Party, within the Republican Party, within think tanks, within education, within religion, and within culture who feed off of the reactionary impulses resulting from systemic victimization and under-education. Those are the people you’re fighting, on climate change, on militarism, on capitalist exploitation, on inequality, on fascism, and all the rest of it. You are fighting the users who benefit from cultivating reactionary impulse. And you have to change the structure of the system itself from one of pay-to-play, class-oriented exploitation to one that is genuinely democratic, to one that compassionately embraces both reason and wisdom and that treats every life, including the holistic life of the biosphere of the planet itself, with respect. You have to reform the government from an exclusionary class hierarchy built by slaveholders (and still held by a kind of slaveholder capitalist class) into a genuine democracy. You have to solidify the rules of the game and make them fair, so that there are fewer sociopolitical and economic systemic weaknesses for reactionaries to exploit.
Like every living thing on the Earth itself, all of these things are connected. You’ve got to repair all of them holistically and stop treating each individual problem with small-scale solutions. You’ve got to start thinking systemically and looking at the larger picture. And we have to change the way we all live. We need walkable cities and mass transit, not billions of electric cars. We need sustainable local agriculture and industry, not factory farms and energy pipelines and genetically modified monocultures. We need more investment in people, in communities, and in applied research and the utilities required to put that into practice in daily life. We need to make living well the focus, rather than acquisition.
No more wars. No more imperialism. No more empire building, large or small. No more fantasies about infinite growth or being ‘greater’ than something or someone else because of our ability to take or exploit. No more hand-wringing about how to effectively work with fascists or capitalist world destroyers. We need to be figuring out how to ensure that they cannot stop us from repairing our world, and how to ensure that they never have the chance to destroy it again. The word bipartisanship is poison when one group of partisans is evil and overtly bent upon obliterating life. We can have that argument in a structured, civil way, now, through the structures of a reformed democracy, or we can have it in a far more chaotic, destructive manner later everywhere, when the time for civility and rationality and restraint has given way to the harsh realities of a ruined world. Now is the time to make these hard choices. Not a year from now. Not a decade from now. We have to change dramatically and systemically, for all our sakes, and for the sake of the people who will come after us.
Second vaccine dose: complete.
So far, floaty, ‘feels like you’re about to get sick’ feeling. They say the second round is a little tougher. I don’t know how it’s been for others, but in my case the vaccine reaction seems similar to, but less intense than, the experience of actually catching it (had it last year). The vaccine is like an echo of the start of the illness (which is good, because that means it’s working).
Looking forward to visiting ‘places’ again for non-essential activity. Yes, some of us have actually been following the guidelines for thirteen months, rather than spreading death because we can’t be bothered with inconvenience. Maybe I’ll go buy me a book that didn’t arrive on my porch in a box. ☺
Point of order / PSA. I do not debate with fascists, or right-wing theorists, or whatever the fuck it is you might call yourself. Don’t show up in my notes looking for a debate. Don’t @ me on twitter. Don’t self-righteously call me out in a pathetic attempt at embarrassment. Our views of the universe are fundamentally irreconcilable. If you wanna learn and reform and be better, that’s great. Do it on your own time. My goal is not to make peace with the right. My goal is to create a world where dehumanizing and destructive right-wing philosophies are extinct. I have no interest in being polite to you, or being seen as being polite to you. Politeness is something I show to people acting like human beings, to insects, or to plants. The users of the world will receive none of it from me. I take pride in this, and will take any opportunity to exhibit my overt hatred of fascism, capitalism, religious fundamentalism, unfounded conspiracy theory, terfdom, or any other right-wing nonsense that crosses my path. You’re not going to shame me. I will climb down into the muddiest part of Hell and roll around naked, in from of everyone, like a fucking pig and laugh about it the whole time. And you won’t get the opportunity to bank any social capital off of that, because I will, if I can, drag you down into the mud with me, because this whole social construct is absurd and I’ve spent a lifetime stepping around evil douchebags and I’m sick of it. Be fucked. You wanna go rant and rave and spew bullshit, do it on your own feed. Don’t bring that shit around here.
