this might be an unpopular take. You don't have to listen to it. But I was asked on tour what my advice for fellow trans people is, and here it is:

right now, it might be more important that your paperwork match the gender you can pass as rather than your gender identity. I would keep your legal name and gender marker unless you reach a point where you reliably pass. I would avoid getting an X gender marker.

You can ignore this advice, that's fine. But it's my advice. It's not a good time to be on lists.

i understand cynicism but, uh

revolutions happen all the time.

anarchist revolutions have happened multiple times and will again.

anticolonial revolutions have happened over and over again.

https://twitter.com/anarchoboognish/status/1852139180266262795

what revolutions don't necessarily do is make things better. They can! There are lessons we can learn from past revolutions to make future revolutions more likely to improve things.

Unfortunately, each of those things means playing the game on a harder mode.

Disaster compassion is real. Here are some things I've seen today and yesterday in Western North Carolina: The Asheville Tool Library and a repair clinic teamed up behind firestorm to fix countless broken generators and chainsaws, just folks sitting around on their trucks fixing two-stroke engines, cheering as each one starts running and then goes out to where it can save people

i drove into asheville today to deliver supplies for various mutual aid orgs and to, yeah, do some journalism. I took this week off of writing about history, next week's podcast is going to be about the groups doing stuff in western north carolina right now. what's happening in Asheville right now is absolutely classic "disaster compassion." I lost count of how many grassroots mutual aid organizations are working together to distribute resources. Sure, it's the usual folks, like the progressive churches and the anarchists...

western north carolina is an image of the future. disasters will get worse. This is not a reason to despair. It is a reason to get organized. To get prepared. In the current crisis, we can clearly see the purpose of individual/family preparedness as a way to help larger collective disaster resilience. The largest problem (that we're currently aware of) is that people are stranded without power, communications, food, water, or gas.

hitting nazis with heavy objects works. I've talked to antifascists in multiple countries about how the growth of fascism was stopped through militant street resistance.

https://twitter.com/IwriteOK/status/1819886016913887617

fascism is a populist movement, and street violence is an important component to its growth. but nazis make poor underdogs... the average fascist wants to be a fascist when he feels like he is winning. He wants to feel strong with his strong buddies.

this is one of the worst pieces of political writing I've ever encountered, and I read political history for a living.

Although I have nothing nice to say about the attempt to reform authoritarian leftism for the modern era, I'm speaking only about the actual prose.

https://twitter.com/ACPMain/status/1815163785134436404

The very first sentence reads like a fragment: you generally don't say "not only in..." without following up with a "but..."

The second sentence contains a comma splice ("the united mission" is the subject of both the first and second clause, so the comma should not be present)

the founding fathers waged the revolutionary war because they wanted to steal more land from indigenous people than the king would let them.

they sold a myth of freedom to those that they ruled in order to put their bodies into the charnel house of war

happy 4th of july the hypocrisy baked into the American revolution has poisoned every attempt at democracy that it inspired.

abolish the united states

the decolonial war is not over. it took Ireland 800 years to win its freedom. turtle island still has time.

I'm going to define some terms, because most of them have become essentially jargon. Socialism, communism, anarchism, democratic socialism, libertarian socialism, authoritarian socialism. First of all, the meaning of these terms shifts country to country and year to year, confusing matters greatly. An anarchist in 1880s Chicago would also call themselves a socialist. "Communist" had a much broader meaning before 1917. So I'm going to be a bit broad.

In my 20+ years of activism I've never seen this level of police response to so little provocation. The student protests have hit a nerve, and are honestly more threatening to power than I (or likely most anyone) would have guessed. Everyone I've talked to about it has a different explanation. Maybe the police in the US are terrified of another 2020 and are committed to crushing all dissent. Maybe the bipartisan support for Israel as a bulwark for US interests must be preserved at all costs.

peter kropotkin, in his mid-seventies, moved back to Russia during the early days of the revolution, when there was hope in the air. He watched as the anarchist movement was crushed by the Bolsheviks, leveraging whatever prestige he had to try to preserve free press. the Bolsheviks, despite pretending to respect him, requisitioned his apartments two different times, and at last he moved to a small town, where he kept counsel for the workers and peasants, offering what advice he could.

hey so like

we should actually be worried

and working together with our friends and communities to figure out what risks we want to take to address these problems, and how we want to work together to face what is absolutely coming (and already here).

https://twitter.com/think_or_swim/status/1683556231481286656

if you want to know what I think, I think that we should be building resilient communities that focus on inclusion instead of gatekeeping, that value conflict resolution and disaster preparedness, that support a diversity of tactics against climate change.

"but in anarchism how would people's needs be met?"

you know me, I don't want to add to the discourse I wanna comment on the discourse itself.

The people who think they have a "gotcha" on anarchism are arguing against the "anarchy" they grew up being told about. so the anarchists respond "well, we have quite a bit of both theory and practice that shows us how we would meet any given need in an anarchist society"

but both sides are arguing across one another. The anarchist understands anarchism. The other person has the wrong basic idea.

i’m not a labor historian, but i read history books about social struggle for a living.

my takeaway so far?

unions and strikes are pretty much how we’ve gotten anything nice in this world, for anyone who wasn’t born into fuck-off wealth. unions one of the most effective strategies for the sorts of reforms that make our lives bearable. they’ve gotten us to the point where fewer people have to work 14 hour days 6-7 days a week.

they’ve done more than that.

now more than ever, we need to break the stigma around "prepping" and preparedness. Individual and community preparedness go hand-in-hand. By being prepared as individuals, we are better positioned to help our community. By preparing as a community, we are stronger as individuals It's the time to talk to your friends and family about what they're doing to get ready for various service interruptions and disasters. It's time to do threat analysis--what crises are likely? How might we be better prepared to face those crises?

this is a thread compiling information about dealing with smoke from someone from a lefty prepper discord I'm on, mostly written by an australian:

Stay inside as much as possible and seal doors and windows. Any animals you care for should also be inside as much as possible. If you're outside, plan for things to take more time. People may get out of breath way quicker than they're used to and your regular day to day activity levels may become difficult.

a friend asked me how i keep up hope while everything is going so badly. it's something I think about a lot.

first and foremost: you can't win a game unless you're playing to win. no matter how stacked the odds are against you, you play until the end. we're not at the end. since this struggle is bigger than ourselves, there IS no end. the struggle for a society without oppression (which I call the anarchist struggle, and other people have other names for) is a struggle that cannot be lost.

if they mean what they say, here's a thread of ideas about how to stand up for yourself or your trans loved ones (or just be a decent human) during this time of escalating legislative and extralegal threats and violence against LGBT people first and foremost: focus on what unites us, not what divides us. focus on deescalating all conflict that isn't with the enemy. This doesn't mean we all have to agree about everything, but it does mean we have bigger problems right now.

too many preppers focusing on FAFO not enough focusing on FIFO (first in, first out, the proper way to store canned goods)

West Virginia is proposing a law to ban "adult businesses." Similar laws and anti-porn laws are cropping up around the country after Louisiana's anti-porn law passed. This is vile on its own. It also could easily impact more people than is immediately obvious. Some of these new laws make it so anywhere anyone is publicly performing in clothes not suited to their sex-assigned-at-birth becomes an "adult business." If I give a talk or play a show in a state that passes that bill, that venue would become classified as an adult business.

if someone is beating you with a stick and you say “stop please” and people are like “please articulate the details exactly how you want society to function without that guy beating you with a stick” you are under no obligation to answer. while the work of envisioning society without police is worthwhile, it is not necessary that each of us have it on the tip of our tongues. it is enough to say “not this.”