This is an event meant to brutally punish the whole state. They kidnap your neighbor & they beat you or blind you with pepper spray. They give you a traumatic brain injury. They send babies to the ICU with destroyed lungs.

They release carcinogenic chemicals everywhere. They smash car windows & break down doors.

This ain't just a little unrest. It's a goddamn prolonged assault.

People going out in the streets aren't causing the violence. They are doing their damnedest to prevent & limit it.

The assault is fucking happening, motherfuckers, & people staying indoors & just letting it happen wouldn't fucking change that.

They were not able to create the story that they wanted to because Minneapolis said, "no, those are our people, & this is our city."

This is disastrous for the authoritarian project. Whatever happens next, whatever Minnesotans find themselves having to do to try to protect each other, the narratives that the fash wanted to create out of this just will not materialize.

They miscalculated terribly in a NUMBER of ways. They thought they were going to be able to just do this without pushback or consequence. They thought people were just going to be quiet & submit.

They fucking thought wrong.

And frankly, they just made racial injustice extremely real & extremely obvious to a lot of people who up to this point weren't getting it. By violently abducting people's neighbors, whom they KNOW, whom they are actively trying to HELP, you've given them whatever proof their doubting eyes needed.

Much to their shock & horror, it turns out they got in charge *too late* to reverse the effects of actual education on racial injustice & actual experience with the wonders of diversity. The "damage" has already been done.

It's too late to put this particular cat back in the bag. It is way too goddamn late. Minneapolis says they can't spare a single one of their people & that there is no one who doesn't belong (except for ICE who need to GET THE FUCK OUT).

They thought they would create violent scenes that would make white people go "oh, thank God those brave men are out there protecting us from the criminal immigrants."

Instead you just have people banding together while under violent assault from ICE. The only violence is coming from the government thugs. Everyone recognizes who the violent aggressor in their home is. The narrative is just not coming together for them.

Minneapolis is proof that the fash were right to be terrified of "DEI" & "CRT" and all that.

A lot of white people aren't aligning around their whiteness anymore, & it is disastrous for these white supremacist authoritarians. It's absolutely world-shattering. The white people of Minnesota were never, ever supposed to even be capable of recognizing POC as their neighbors, entitled to their care & protection. The people of Minneapolis have reached a decision about who belongs & it's "all of us".

Frankly, the fash didn't actually expect people of ANY color to be willing to risk their lives every day for one another.

The actions of Minnesotans over the past several weeks run counter to every assumption the fash make about human behavior.

They assume cruelty. They assume cowardice & self-preservation. What the people of Minneapolis have been doing is literally incomprehensible to them.

It's weird that my little brother—an atheist (as am I)—is more Christian right now than our Christian family.

He is being moved & motivated by the teachings of Jesus about love for your neighbors to get out & help people. That is what's putting fire in his belly.

And the people in the fam who "believe" in that God? Some of them don't give two shits about what Jesus supposedly said. Weird.

>"Why is it that projects aimed at democratizing society are so often perceived as idle dreams that melt away as soon as they encounter hard reality? It seems to me that the reality effect comes rather from the fact that radical projects tend to founder—or become endlessly difficult—the moment they enter into the world of large heavy objects: buildings, cars, tractors, boats, industrial machinery. This is not because these objects are somehow difficult to administer democratically."

[cont.]

>"It's because they are surrounded by endless government regulation, and are effectively impossible to hide from the government's armed representatives."

- David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules

David Graeber's The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, & the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy is a must read for anyone wondering what we mean when we say the violence has *been there* under the surface the whole time, just hidden & made to look acceptable.

Graeber shows you the mechanisms of violence through bureaucracy.

So if you want to know why I say there is nothing good for us to rewind the clock to, this book does a good job describing one of the several reasons that's true.

>If one resists the reality effect created by pervasive structural violence—the way that bureaucratic regulations seem to disappear into the very mass & solidity of the large heavy objects around us, the buildings, vehicles, large concrete structures, making a world regulated by such principles seem natural & inevitable, & anything else a dreamy fantasy—it is possible to give power to the imagination. But it also requires an enormous amount of work.

David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules, p 101

>The hidden reality of human life is the fact that the world doesn't just happen. It isn't a natural fact, even though we tend to treat it as if it is—it exists because we all collectively produce it.

>Insurrectionary moments are moments when this bureaucratic apparatus is neutralized. Doing so always seems to have the effect of throwing horizons of possibility wide open, which is to be expected if one of the main things that apparatus normally does is to enforce extremely limited horizons.

>All these regulations [on large heavy objects like cars & buildings] are enforced by violence. True, in ordinary life, police rarely come in swinging bully clubs to enforce building code regulations, but, as anarchists often are uniquely positioned to find out, if one simply pretends the state & its regulations don't exist, this will eventually happen. The rarity with which the nightsticks actually appear just helps to make the violence harder to see.

- Graeber, The Utopia of Rules, p. 86

>When one is asked to be "realistic" then, the reality one is normally being asked to recognize is not one of natural, material facts, nor some supposed ugly truth about human nature. Being "realistic" usually means taking seriously the effects of the systematic threat of violence.

- Graeber, The Utopia of Rules, p. 86

@inthehands
I cannot stop laughing at how fantastic this is.

And I can't help but think about the Richard Scarry story where they packed the plane too full, so enjoy the illustration. This is how I am picturing the train right now.

Maybe if he does prove to be opening up to reality a little bit, I'll see what I can do to ease a transition.

I think it's really hard for men like my brother because if they admitted that something happening outside the walls of their community matters, it would mean feeling the obligation to *do something*.

I was listening to a YouTuber I like who said she thinks some men have a hard time acknowledging the violence of the present situation because they have been taught to think of themselves as "protectors" & "warriors", so if something this cruel & brutal was actually happening, they are scared they would have to *do* something.

But here's the thing. I do need my big bro to do things, but it's not "go out & get yourself killed." He's got a very large family. He needs to take care of his kids.