Since none of us are voting and your votes won't swing any election, there's really not much of a point in litigating the distribution of probabilities, since the results will be upon us soon enough anyway. But for the hell of it, some thoughts on the timelines where Trump wins: The most important data point for me is that at the start of the Muslim ban, lawyers and sitting congressmen would take court orders to the cops, and the cops would say "lol, who cares, I only take orders from the president."

FOX insulated Trump from learning he had this power.

ITS and its english language press office Atassa are not technically "fascist" because they're not *nationalist.* They're just hyper reactionaries who want to exterminate everyone on the planet, delight in misogyny, praise nazis, and had an alt-right trad cath spokesman/editor.

https://twitter.com/unflicuneballe/status/1634117576841129984

ITS was basically just a Mexico City crew that weren't indigenous and tried to murder anarchists, plus, in the US, a trad cath Berkeley graduate lawyer who married a vivisectionist and hosted all their content on the Atassa site back before he turned it into a journal.

1) There's never been a "trustworthy" state -- the state system is everywhere the continuation of pillage and despotism, not formed a priori from reason. It's just centralized murder.

2) Different ecosystems can congeal in decentralized systems with different stable norms.

https://twitter.com/WritesCoco/status/1791868605472120905

A fuck ton of people are monsters and will likely continue to emerge as monsters in even the best society. This means we have to evaluate what are the most effective checks and balances on monsters. Centralization provides no real checks, plus gives them economies of scale.

Some context for those new to all this:

There's a "Morality vs Ethics" distinction in continental philosophy that turns on different associations of those words in other languages and doesn't exist natively (or is reversed) in english and academic ethical philosophy. Mainstream professional philosophy usually treats ethics and morality as interchangeable and synonymous terms. In fact, where there is deviation from this, the distinction tends to be that morality is anything about your personal values, and ethics is about social codes/laws.

The sliver of truth to "horseshoe theory" is that some people are motivated primarily by power fantasies of violent revenge, a kind of ecstatic abdication of ethical consideration, and they will latch onto whatever part of the political spectrum they think will scratch this itch.

https://twitter.com/BeardedAnarchy3/status/1710839855155228921

This is why you get the most outraged reactions to "yes, severely violent resistance to an open-air prison is totally justified, but rape is not" from tankies -- because in their minds THE WHOLE POINT is an excuse to turn off the moral consideration part of their brain.

Welp. Yall ready for a big ol thread on Peter Gederloos' attacks on Lee?

I know, right, but he won't stop going after her with wacky claims so here we are.

https://twitter.com/PeterGelderloos/status/1699129241575518540

A while ago Peter out of the blue quote tweeted and spewed a long rambling hostile and insulting rant against a solid thread from Lee where she pointed out the fact that therapy rarely stops abusers because it's not effective at changing core values and ideology.

What anti-antifa boomers think No Platform is:

"Bad ideas are scary and dangerous and should not be engaged with because people are weak and will faint on contact. Everyone should live in ignorance and also anyone we don't like should be banned from speaking." What No Platform actually is:

Everyone should critically read what reactionaries write (formally and informally)! But social framings shape subcultural norms around what's within and outside the overton window. Helping display someone on a stage functions as legitimization.

One of the most consistent flags that marks reactionary or fascist critiques of "industrial society" or civ or whatever is a focus on the number of people. Kaczynski kinda skimmed other critiques and focused in on "too many people around" and pretty much every fash does too.

https://twitter.com/TheFigen_/status/1672206919342120961

To these fuckers the core thing wrong with the fucking gulags was "too many people."

It's completely batshit. And they treat it as self-evident, that surely everyone agrees with their personal distaste for crowds and strangers.

When like, I've always found such joyous.

My mother's New Age perspective is more or less that whatever you believe is, by definition, true for you.

...So she will howl at me and my sisters when we bring up wildly abusive things she's done, "Why are you choosing to believe that?!! What does it benefit you!?" The idea of there being a single fixed objective material reality, rather it being a shared social "consensus" dream, is literally her definition of evil. In the specific cult in which we were raised (400k members worldwide!) the language they use for this is "Mortal Mind."

An individual's beliefs CONSTANTLY constrain their agency, because agency involves being accurately informed.

If someone is trying to make a decision with false information (like about the STI status of the person they're with), their choice has no purchase on the world. Freedom is about your ability to act within and influence the world.

It makes no difference if this is constrained by being imprisoned within physical bars, or gaslighted with a false map of reality. Both are means of control and constraint of freedom.

The source of all of nu-atheism's problems was that it wasn't actually militant.

Their focus on tolerance, diversity of perspectives and civil debate inclined them to a tepid statist liberalism that saw platforming reactionaries as a virtue. And so they were consumed by such. The simple fact is that the lowest-common-denominator conservative populism that flooded nuatheism's ranks and consumed the brains of its lead grifters, causing everyone with a conscience to flee, wouldn't have been possible if they were an underground movement planting bombs.

A reminder: if it's not survivor-led, it's not "accountability" it's just some friends getting together to find how to spin things. "How can X be accountable to The Community for abusing Y?" is a nonsense question. There's no such thing as The Community. It's a phantom, a fabrication, a distraction, a deflection. If your proposal is anything other than what Y prescribes, you are defending an abuser.

Anarchist: "I'm saying that individuals who care about stopping oil should take action against pipelines."

Liberals: "So you're saying anyone should do whatever they feel like, including nazis murdering you???!! This is literally exactly the same thing as jim crow lynch mobs." The liberal is *incapable* of understanding what an individual moral evaluation or commitment is, they immediately, reflexively try to meta out so that a moral appeal is a decontextualized *policy proposal* to be implemented without regard for perspective, goal, value, actor, etc

Who is responsible for convincing a crop of younger libs that there's some "well known" epidemic of mastermind abusers immaculately DARVOing such that all knowledge or evaluation of abuse is impossible and we must never judge anything ever? Folks really be out here thinking that abusers are like masterminds in some lengthy murder mystery who systematically create fractal galaxies of perfectly fabricated evidence.

Abusers are fucking dipshits who usually don't even understand what constitutes abuse or evidence.

One core plank of anarchism is that ends and means are interconnected; it's strategically incoherent to gulag people into being free.

But *interconnected* is not the same thing as *identical.*

We don't want "a world of punching" and yet we must punch nazis. If your ends are liberation then there are some means that are simply bad at obtaining that goal. Torturing folks for eternity not only cannot obtain liberation, but instantiates the opposite. Building a giant state without a viable means to have it self-abolish is wildly inept.

We could sit here all day listing names Nandita Sharma, Michael Taylor, Kevin Carson, David Graeber, James C Scott, Alan Carter, Harold Barclay, William C Anderson, Tom Nomad, Alfredo Bonanno, Roderick Long, etc

But I made a zine archive and reading list:
github.com/rechelon/zine_…

https://twitter.com/anarchopac/status/1624827331306041344

The main thing to note about comtemporary/relevant anarchist theory that isn't a creaking zombie from the 1800s or disconnected academic trash is that it often takes place in decentralized and frequently anonymous, pseudonymous, or one-off publications and *discussions.*

Non-syndicalists reacted so violently to The Anarchist FAQ, saw it as such an existential threat, that many spent over a decade embracing the defensive response that it's *impossible* to define anarchism and excluding anything (including fascists) from the tradition is tyranny. I've spent more than my fair share of evenings ranting about the evils of Mckay's FAQ and Black Flame. I fully recognize how horrible the partisan red historians are, but the opposite direction (muddying the historical waters to let literally anything in) was just as bad.

I was asked about a picture I used a while back of currency that anarchist collectives issued during the Spanish Revolution. I'm a huge nerd about this shit, so here's a thread.





If you ask a communist the standard take is that the spanish anarchists failed to Go Far Enough, failed to Communize Hard Enough, and this caused a mixed economy that devolved back to capitalism. And it's true they often refrained from seizing the property of literally everyone.