Ben

Historical anarchists weren't just against representative democracy. They also opposed direct democratic governments. This was because (a) majority government would oppress and dominate various minorities + (b) actual direct democracies like ancient Athens were really just forms of minority rule.

In 1934 the anarchist Emma Goldman complained that "the pattern of life has become standardized, routinized, and mechanized like canned food and Sunday sermons . . . Even songs are turned out like buttons or auto­mobile tires—all cast from the same mold".

Vulgar standpoint theory: listen to x person just because they belong to y oppressed group.

Actual standpoint theory: people who belong to an oppressed group generally have experiences of oppression. This places them in a better epistemic position to collectively develop knowledge of it.

This cartoon is from 1894 but could have been drawn today. The solution to this problem remains the same as it was in the 19th century: workers and tenants organizing strikes for higher wages and lower rent. To win we have to build power from below.

'Overpopulation' Is A Racist Trope. It's Time We Laid It To Rest A new movie satirises the myth that climate change is a consequence of too many people. In the real world, our overpopulation obsession must be euthanised.

"by telling the poor that their poverty is the result of the children they don't avoid having, the wealthy West deflects attention from its brutal, systematic impoverishment of the Global South" - @davidrvetter.bsky.social

climatelaundry.substack.com/p/overpopula...

Everyone should read Zoe Baker's book means and ends. It is an incredible summary of anarchist thinking and the history of the field. It is fundamentally important for understanding and thinking clearly about the political morass we find ourselves in today.

Too many liberals respond to problems by putting their hope in the next election. The result is a feeling of passivity and powerlessness. Politicians aren't going to save us. We have to save ourselves and take direct action. Doing so builds our collective strength and ability to change the world.

This is, once again, a clear demonstration of the machinations of state power corrupting people. These people hold left wing views, but they can do nothing with them because they requirements of government forbit them to. We don't need better politicians, we need to overcome this system.

I'm glad she's saying it now, don't get me wrong. But we needed this years ago when this was first starting up. In fact, trans people have been saying this forever. Trans feminism has focused on the crossovers between cis and trans women forever.

She'll say this now that the democrats aren't the party of government. This is what I mean when I say that the democrats in power legitimate motion for the right. They refuse to make these robust challenges because they're afraid, and in so doing lay the groundwork for evil.

Democracy as a concept must centre this shared making of reality, this collective generation and inscription of moral and proceedural concerns into systems that escape individual control. Democracy is supposed to give humanity agency over systems.

This quote is key. Democracy is supposed to be the ways in which we inscribe our shared reality onto the meta-systems that we use to control wider human society. Where do we see this happening today? I argue we simply do not, and in representative systems it is made impossible.

It's really important to not kid ourselves into thinking that our communicative work can do anything to change the world. It is important to remember that democracy itself does not hold sway over the world system, nor over our own national systems.

What she explains so clearly, is that images and ideas and cultural shifts did not and cannot drive changes in foreign policy in our current system. They can give ammunition to those who seek to end it, but shifts are driven by other trends, those more central to power relations.

This video by
@MorbidZoo
is wildly important if you're going to think about changing the world in any way. Particularly how she discusses the impacts of journalism on the Vietnaam war, and how power relations and journalism interacted. t.co/GCb0t6BhSJ

And women also are forced to and trained to repress it, so self reported wellness may not be an accurate measure? Measuring the impacts of sexual assault like this seems silly for this reason. We know it does extreme harm, let's just start from that point instead of relativising it.

Ok I now see others have pointed out that point, so perhaps I'll explain the second point in relation to sexual assault. I'm not sure how they measured it, but women experience sexual assault in society to a terrifying degree, and so the entire scale of measurement probably reflects that.

If I'm understanding correctly, and I may not be, the graph shows effect sizes not direction. So it may be that breakfast has a positive impact, while sexual assault a negative one. This is intelligible to me given the degree to which women downplay and are forced to survive sexual assault. Maybe?

When we publish with the big journals we sign away any right to control the research we create. They're well within their rights to do this, and it's why all of these mega corporations must fall.

Where do they say that? It's always something stupid like that, but I'd be interested to see how they justify that given that I'm pretty sure I've read strong arguments for concentrating people into urban centres and all that (no idea the validity of it recently, just a thought).

Me peripherally being made aware of wild discourse happening somewhere on the internet.

The reason why not is it allows you to justify whatever behaviour you want because the ends justify the means. Malm is a dangerous authoritarian, who thinks anything the left does is justified as long a it works because it's in service of a goal he likes. It's inconsistent and genuinely dangerous.

The reason why not is it allows you to justify whatever behaviour you want because the ends justify the means. Malm is a dangerous authoritarian, who thinks anything the left does is justified as long a it works because it's in service of a goal he likes. It's inconsistent and genuinely dangerous.

"We just need the other systems transformations" belies the fact that the other systems include the systems of innovation that create solutions. This separation of technology and politics/society is ahistorical and miss-understands the depth of the transition required.

OOOOOOFFFFFFFFF

It's just such a basic point that fundamental transformation would both necessitate and create technological innovation that it shouldn't need to be said. The fact that social transformation creates innovation is ignored so often as well.

Nah, people who think technological innovation is all we need. The ones who think if we don't do it by some shifting deadline then everything will collapse. Both rely on collapse as a justifying force.

I suppose a better way to understand the point is that apocalyptic doomers are the other side of the same coin as the tech optimist crew, because there's this sentiment of "if we don't solve it now we're fucked". The tech liberalism relies on that too.