It's weird to be decades into libertarians discovering left market anarchists and still fielding these kinds of critiques. Anarchism isn't "remove the state and whatever might come is good" it's a deep critique of power and thus *obliges* cultural and institutional changes.

https://twitter.com/NathanPGoodman/status/1948880533578285334

Yes, we frequently highlight the systematic and dispersed impact of sustained state violence on shaping our present capitalist world and its economic and social norms. But we are not "come what may" advocates. As Charles emphasized endlessly: *we* are the market. We get choices.

"Lifestyle anarchism" continues to signify whatever one personally finds frustratingly illegible about a *movement* rather than a *Party.*

You don't know the local prison support crew? Then they're lifestylists. You don't get why some friends are brewing kombucha? Lifestylists! Movements are fluid ecosystems. They grow projects & networks that defy easy mapping. They accrue tacit knowledge from praxis & argumentation that can't be codified into a single FAQ or onboarding document.

This is frustrating to newbies and infuriating to would-be bureaucrats.

Love the inane "trump voters are just a product of material conditions" re-tread of 2016's "it's just economic anxiety." Same sort of reactionaries saying it, but they've swapped from identifying as libs to marxists. People love Trump because 1) our epistemic ecosystems are toxic sludge, 2) many people have intense investments in the (often non-material) benefits of patriarchy and racism, 3) fear of ratcheting cancelation has scared every type of amoral bastard into mobilizing together...

Terminally online tankies trying to understand an actual living breathing movement, having no experience with such:

"hrmmm, getting a lot of [list of dead white guys from a century ago] vibes from this"

https://twitter.com/Khadijahaynes1/status/1852828434377887853

Like don't get me wrong, I have my critiques and deviances from some of the movement's tendencies, but for better or worse modern anarchism is a mixture of radical feminism, quaker consensus, fourth generation warfare theory, 70s anthropology, and some of the autonomists.

"The Revolution will never come."

Well yeah, obviously. *Specific* revolutions will be won. Insurgencies will erode the ability of power everywhere to function. Prefigurative experimentation will spread more liberatory norms. Technologies will be contested and shifted. Our forever walk towards anarchy -- as Malatesta described it -- is not a single hop on a single day. It's a gradual process of erosion and catalyzing strength.

Such evolution can be violent and punctuated, but there is no magical day after which we finish and rest.

An underexamined problem is that the most noxious reactionary shit emerges in radical spaces during the downturn.

2008-20010 was horrible. 2015-2018 was likewise the worst. Say what you will about the grifters and monsters flooding in during the peaks, the lean years are nasty. t.co/WKGmJQ8aeu When the tide comes in there's a feeding frenzy, everyone eats well but new monsters arrive. Then the new monsters are slowly and painfully eliminated and the children spawned mature. Then there's no resources, contests feel zero-sum, and power floods into non-radical lefty shit.

There are distinct questions debated:
* whether slavery was profitable for a slaveowner in comparison to having no workers whatsoever, or in comparison to having wage workers
* whether slavery was profitable at the national level in aggregate wellbeing or national capital Teasing out the distinctness of these questions around "whether profitable" is important because different answers to them reveal differences in power structures and the functions of the chattel slavery, as well as the hierarchies of capitalism.

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.

If you critically respond to someone mischaracterizing atheism or rationality, you'll get a whole bunch of white christians and pagans in your mentions screaming about how this means you're siding with the conquistadors and boarding schools. Just tankie-level bad faith. For the record, I have ZERO problem with some distant post somewhere on this site pointing out that settlers bulldozed burial grounds and hurricanes followed. I make similar snarks with friends all the time. That's irrelevant to the anti-atheist absurdities being pushed.

Calling anarchism "totalitarian" is not new.

Claude Lefort, a French state-communist thinker who helped popularize the originally liberal “totalitarianism” critique, decried the classic anarchist aspiration of the “abolition of power” as “totalitarian” and "despotic thought.” Arendt popularized the analysis by continuing the Nazi project by framing truth itself as totalitarian and “despotic” because of the way that it obliges us, and dishonesty as necessary for democracy (which she takes to be a good thing and somehow at odds with fascism).

This is so utterly silly. Anarchists oppose people holding all kinds of mistaken beliefs about the world -- like for example "whites are smarter" or "police keep us safe" -- opposing beliefs doesn't violate autonomy.

There is no mistaken belief that doesn't grow in consequences. t.co/yI9FZBtVdL Anarchism is about increasing everyone's agency. Core to having agency is modeling of reality. Insofar as you deliberately fail to inform someone of a fact relevant to their decision making (like STI status), you hinder their agency.

https://x.com/uncivilizeddes/status/1845329808613622268

Bad epistemics are everyone's business, sorry.

I don't care if "it makes you feel better" to not look while driving into oncoming traffic. I don't care if telling your kid not to drink bleach like you would "break a family tradition" or "is cultural imperialism." It's totally absurd to think that someone can have bad epistemics in isolation. If you choose to believe there are woodsprites in the bathroom that's not a cute affectation, that's an ontological claim that has serious impactful ethical consequences and will change your actions.

Social media will always reflect preferences that do not match those on-the-ground.

This became starkly apparent in Occupy in 2011 when folks using the hashtags on twitter thought they could dictate policy to those in the camps, much less those in the actual anarchist movement. But one HUGE way that social media does not represent a tendency (anarchism, activism, leftism, etc) is that the audience and participation on social media is overwhelmingly skewed to those relatively isolated, inexperienced and not tapped in. None of those make one bad! But...

At the beginning of my forthcoming book on the Science Wars I lay out the standard sneers re Sokal's hoax that have become "common sense" echoed among certain pomo & STS academics. This video is a paint-by-numbers recounting of them. It's thoroughly wrong:
It's almost *boring* how rote it is. But there's a common incentive by both pomo academics and IDW grifters to turn the hoax into something to do with "peer review" when it was never about that. It was about demonstrating that Social Text would platform the starkest antirealism.

I swear to god, if we could get even just a single fucking leftist to read this single paragraph to conclusion.

It's literally the second paragraph in "Bad People" but they never do. They squirm away and start screaming that we must be talking about souls, free will or genes. Look I'm all about the capacity to reach people, to persuade people, I'm a fucking writer! My role in camps and actions is often to be the person intercepting the libs or chuds who want to argue and defusing them.

But some people cannot be reached, full stop.

Tankies have to collapse pretty much every normal distinction (between spheres of individual autonomy, having more or less options, etc) until "I want to be free and not in chains" equates "imposing one's will" upon someone who wants you in chains. Utterly absurd brainworms.

https://twitter.com/peopleswaryuri/status/1814043215948836981

This is *identical* to the perspective of fascists, who likewise see the world as a zero-sum contestation of power, where there's no escape from power relations even conceivable, only a rearrangement of who's on top.

This is what anarchists mean when we say tankies are red fash.

The idea that there would be no guns in an anarchist utopia is beyond nonsensical.

The material *capacity* to do violence is both *constitutive* of freedom (as technological agency is part of freedom) and its necessary underpinning (as asymmetric veto against community tyranny). Of course there is no such thing as a terminal utopia. Stateless societies are secured through constant active vigilance and the walk towards anarchy is unending.

But while gun bros are annoying, guns (and dynamite) are the greatest advances for liberation in human history.

The entire reactionary wave is The Backlash To The Internet.

The creation of the internet allowed anarchist (and similar) ideas to rapidly spread in influence. The resulting catalyzing culture of half-converted liberals (eg tumblr) irked selfish bastards who in turn unionized. We won a fuck ton of ground in the 90s because neither the establishment or reactionaries really understood what was implicitly at stake in the early internet. This played out into inexorable cultural and social advances throughout the 00s. Gamergate was the enemy waking up.

Whenever history starts moving I find myself thinking a lot about how we don't have a spread of targeted introductory zines to anarchism that are painstakingly crafted to speak to every specific demographic and ideology, answering the most basic normie questions with references. The whole phenomenon of tabling in public spaces is weird, because folks' tables are pretty uniform. And like there's always very little to handle 101 conversations or the most common objections from conservatives and liberals. We target other leftists and subculturals.

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.

My consistent stance across anarchist issues is that we need to be ruthlessly grand in our aspirations and values, always keeping them in sight, but we also need to be compassionate, strategic, and realistic in application, rather than flinging ourselves against a brick wall.

https://twitter.com/queersing/status/1799177543519768791

So I critique primitivism because it throws away anarchism's grandest ambitions in favor of a permanent compromise. But just because we should have transhumanist *values* doesn't mean we can directly achieve infinite physical agency. We need to focus on HRT, birth control, etc