Thread by @ElSandifer

OK. This isn’t worth my or indeed anyone’s time, but you know what, it’s worth covering the basics occasionally, so let’s take five and unpack why this and its follow-ups are fucking stupid.

https://twitter.com/faridx78/status/1332442664113905666

First of all, to make a very obvious point, there’s not actually an alternative to using money in 2020. A girl’s gotta eat, capitalism has material power and thus I am stuck using money despite money’s evident stupidity as a concept.

This is literally just “and yet you participate in society.” My beliefs about how the world should work do not magically change the way it does in the here and now, and it’s not hypocrisy to decline to starve to death out of farcical moral purity.

Moving on to this... OK, I haven’t tweeted about voting in weeks. I think voting kinda sucks. It’s a half-assed means of harm reduction. Almost certainly was worth it in 2020 because Trump represents an existential threat to the left, but... yuck.

https://twitter.com/faridx78/status/1332443084693540864

To be wholly explicit, the political actions I take out of a sense of moral obligation incurred by my economic privilege are forms of direct action. These days I’ve narrowed my direct action fund almost entirely to local uses.

And I directly contribute to supporting two separate broke queer kids. This is what I view as the practical exercise of my anarchism: trying to make this world into the one I want to live in.

As I’ve said quite a lot, I don’t really put a lot of stock in big picture political answers. The world is not going to be designed according to a set of ideological principles, and certainly not by mine. Mass populist revolution sounds amazing, but also implausible.

So I’m really not talking about big policies here at all. Inasmuch as I have a plan, it’s intentional communities built around mutual aid. Mostly, in practice, it’s looking at the world and asking “how can I help, right now?”

Which brings us to this. Which I mostly just want to say “fucking lol” to. More for the hilariously broad “anti-capitalism” as a stand-in for... I’m not sure what, exactly.

https://twitter.com/faridx78/status/1332443267175043072

But no, the only thing that would send me out of this country is a rise of fascism that makes it unsafe to be a queer leftist.

Otherwise? I’ll be sticking with my comrades and my community. Because we keep us safe.

Dingbat's back with another one, but this one is actually vaguely interesting. The thing is, I think going off the grid and subsistence farming is profoundly selfish and narcissistic.

https://twitter.com/faridx78/status/1332486858098413574?s=20

Like, cool, you've managed to live a ruggedly individualistic life according to your principles, but you're not pulling anyone up with you. (To say nothing of the myriad forms of privilege that make "living off the grid" possible.)

This is a very obvious point if you think about it for even half a goddamn second, but I can do a lot more good and help a lot more people by actually engaging with a broken system than by flouncing off into the woods.