Notices by Adrian Riskin 🇵🇸🍉 (adrianriskin@kolektiva.social), page 2

@inthehands that's what she sed

@martinvermeer @tchambers thank you for this info!

#ChristmasEve #FelizNavidad #Nativity

@inthehands according to my discrete math/linear algebra students kleenices is the plural of kleenicee.

@Mary625 @RickiTarr I just don't see it that way. Is it possible to bracket the question of factories and banks? I take your point, but I think those industries are fundamentally different from sex work, which always involves a transaction between individuals. Without police interference I don't see why sex workers would ever work for employers. There's no benefit to either producer or consumer for branded sex. Decriminalization is what sex work activists I respect support, and their arguments make sense to me having watched legal but regulated cannabis in California not slow down police violence at all.

@Mary625 @RickiTarr Sex work is heavily regulated in Nevada, which I assume is why brothels exist, but at this point we're getting into factual questions that I don't really know much about. It is a pickle.

@RickiTarr I voted yes, but it depends what you mean by legalized. I think sex work, like all work, should be removed from the purview of laws altogether. Sometimes legalization means regulation, like with cannabis. In practice that allows just as much police violence as criminalization. Sometimes legalization in the sense of absolute nonregulation is called decriminalization, which is what I voted yes for.

'The privatization of land has been justly described as “perhaps the weirdest of all undertakings of our ancestors.”* The transformation of common resources into private property involved not only new ways of using the land, but also, as both cause and effect, new ways of thinking about it. The idea that individuals could claim exclusive ownership of parts of nature on which all humans depend was very weird indeed. Contrary to the oft-expressed view that greed is inherent in human nature, the shift from commons-based to private profit-based farming was not accepted easily—in fact, it was denounced and resisted as an assault of the laws of God and the needs of humanity.'

--- Ian Angus. The War Against the Commons.

*Karl Polanyi. The Great Transformation p. 178.

https://search.worldcat.org/title/1348139994

#Capitalism #Enclosure #Commons #Commonism #Resistance #Anarchism #IanAngus

@edwiebe @jepyang if they buy a new car obviously the old one didn't meet their requirements.

@edwiebe @jepyang Like I said elsewhere, you don't know what people use their cars for. You're not the final arbiter of some putative proper function of a car. Just because you use your car to do X doesn't mean that other people don't use cars for a whole range of other purposes.

Evidently some people use them for purposes other than "carry[ing] them and their goods around." Some people use them to please their aesthetic senses, or just to enjoy having, or to make a living driving for Uber, or who knows what? These are very common purposes that cars are used to fulfill. Tools have multiple capabilities which can only be discerned by looking at how they're used, not by a priori reasoning.

@edwiebe @jepyang My point is that you assume you know what "purpose" means when you say "fit for purpose." This is an empirical question that you insist on treating as answerable a priori. It's just not. You assume that the one true function of cars is to move their owners and their goods around but this is empirically wrong. Cars have economic and expressive functions for some people that they cannot fulfill if they're unfashionable. What makes you qualified to determine how everyone should use their car?

@graydon I suppose this is my fault for mentioning anti-anarchist debate trolls ... There's a proverb about that!

A common tactic of anti-anarchist debate trolls is to demand examples of successful anarchist or non-state societies, their point being apparently that in the putative real world these would invariably become Mad Max or Somalia. Facts won't convince the aggressively ignorant, of course, but examples aren't hard to find. Just for instance maroons -- escaped slaves who established communities outside of state control -- in the Americas from the 16th century on are really interesting in this context and there's a ton of literature -- search "maroon" on libgen. I'm currently reading Daniel Sayers on marronage in the Great Dismal Swamp -- straddling the Virginia/North Carolina border -- from 1607-1860, which is fascinating. Here's a quote about one such community, maybe anarchist, maybe not, but definitely non-state and definitely persistent.

_______________

Life among scissioners and their communities was as minimally alienating as one can imagine—but, more important, perhaps as minimally alienating as any people have ever managed to achieve in the modern world. These were not communes that lasted a decade or so but rather communities and metacommunities that persisted across several generations, even if they did change during that long period.

The archaeological residues of this long-vanished mode of communitization at one site in particular, referred to as the nameless site, have yielded unassailable direct evidence, and much more additional indirect evidence, for a Diasporic community of individuals who followed rules of their own making and acceptance; who maintained community organization and coherence by generating custom and tradition; who labored for themselves and their fellow scissioners; and who existed as beings possessed of true consciousness, in the Marxian sense of truthful or accurate comprehension of the world around them derived from critical awareness of its real social conditions.

_______________

http://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=2CC9C4BD690D8CF9568796BD8E240CE9

#Anarchy #Anarchism #Slavery #Virginia #NorthCarolina #GreatDismalSwamp #Maroons #Marronage

“Our military is not an equal opportunity employer. We’re looking for the best of the best to do whatever. We’re not looking for different groups, social justice groups. We don’t want to single-handedly destroy our military from within,” --T. Tuberville

From the 17th Century through the 1950s American white supremacy depended on the explicit violent control of BIPOC, hence racially segregated armed forces. Naturally they weren't going to supply the internal enemy with access to advanced weaponry and military training.

After WWII more prescient capitalists like Truman understood that the stability of their exploitative regime depended on moving to more subtle, less visible means of control, which included racial integration. The revolutionary activities of BIPOC veterans after WWII suggests the old time supremacists weren't wrong to worry.

Plausibly Tuberville is looking forward to a future more like the good old days before the war -- the civil war.

#TommyTuberville #USMilitary #USArmy #Racism #USPolitics

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/09/tommy-tuberville-another-breathtakingly-bad-stance-on-diversity

Here's a problem I have trying to explain to people why I want to abolish police, abolish prisons. No matter how I phrase things many people hear a moral argument. That police are evil, prisons are evil. But this isn't at all what I mean. In fact seeing the issue that way, as a matter of good and evil, completely obscures the explanation. It brings it into the realm of opinion. It lets people nod their heads and stop listening. Of course people can disagree over things like this!

Dichotomies like that, good/evil, moral/immoral, work this way to cover up truths about the world that are impossible to face and still go on normally. The two poles of such dichotomies immediately conjure up a continuum between them. If something is evil or immoral it can be made less evil or less immoral and that's some kind of progress. Not accepting this kind of incrementalism makes one a moralist, a perfectionist, an idealist, a purist, someone who can ultimately be ignored, someone they can agree to disagree with, like we all do in order to get along with people with so many matters of opinion. There's no need to listen any more, it's just another extreme theoretical position among all the others.

Imagine buzzards eating corpses on the road with their heads deep in the guts of a rotting deer. The stench of death, the slimy putrid ooze on their bald heads. It's not evil, it's how they live, but it's not how human beings live. Being seen by other people willingly, joyfully, smearing one's body with corpse juice, reveling in putrefied rotting dead goop, eating gobbets of rotting flesh, would be shameful, inhuman. It's beyond good and evil. It's not the kind of thing that invites accepting, polite disagreement. No one wants to hear that person's explanations about why wallowing in rotten corpses is good, actually. We want to run far away.

This is what the police are like, what prisons are. They thrive on the bodies of murder victims, they blossom on fields soaked with human blood, rotting corpses. Cops, jailers, their supporters, are willingly swimming in pools of rotten stinking death, joyfully breathing its vapors. This essence is very, very well- hidden inside whitewashed mausoleums by ideologies, social narratives, cultural handshakes, and so on.

I saw this all of a sudden a few years ago and I can't unsee it, the corpses swinging in the wind hanged by the tens of thousands and left to decay, but it's not so easy to explain to people. It's not a matter of stating the right facts, measuring the right statistics, it's a way of looking at the world. It can't be explained quickly, which in practice means often it can't be explained at all.

#Abolition #PoliceAbolition #PrisonAbolition #WhitedSepulchres #BeyondGoodAndEvil

@TopWKone @VoxofGod @futurebird you're so close to the truth here. The only reason anyone pays rent is because the police will hurt or kill them if they don't pay and the police will hurt or kill them if they live on unused property. People only pay rent because of the threat of pain or death.

This is how thugs and robbers and landlords make money, but only the last do it legally, because landlords control the state, which is the instrument of the violence their business requires.

Why are you defending this business model? How can you even think it's defensible?

@Stark9837

I am 98% sure that this is something for Akkoma. I don't use it but I read this somewhere and now I can't find anything except this:

https://nya.one/notes/99gtwp14hw

@apps