Notices by Skuppr (skuppr@kolektiva.social)

@abolisyonista truly a banger. Have you heard any other Wolfe Tones? Couple of massive bangers tbh.

I think my deepest self injurious trait is that I struggle to see the line between "making meaning of oppression by thinking, writing and sharing about how it functions, its effects and what we must do about it is one of my best contributions to the world and greatest acts of self care" (rad as fuck, in touch with a radical scholarly lineage from incredible womanist, transfeminist, antiracist, decolonial, disability scholars) and "if I tell every single person in the world every single thing they think and do that is wrong using the perfect explanation they will fix it. If I spend every waking moment interrogating and scrutinising my own thoughts and actions I will be a better person and a more effective organiser and scholar" (impossible, slowly dissolving my brain and many relationships in corrosive acid)

anyone else who lives with a really loud inner critic got any tips? Running out of ideas tbh, v tired of this.

@MediaActivist so sorry to hear this jay, if you wanted to send me your signal no or pgp key I'd love to connect (fair warning I am months behind on my encrypted emails and weeks behind on signal but I will get there eventually haha)

I think more than anything what I have learned this year as I got more plugged into anarchist organising (before everything fell apart and I had to spend autumn/winter in pure survival mode) is that a lot of people (esp men/white ppl) who spend all their time reading the works of dead white wifebeaters have incredible analysis and knowledge of macropolitics and history... and understand absolutely nothing about how power works on a micro/interpersonal/non-state level. People who can give you detailed accounts of the years of lead, can critique authoritarian marxism with incredible precision, know everyone (white and male) in the scene, and organise skillfully and with great effectiveness... Who then turn around and have no understanding of disability politics, of covid, of misogyny, of accessibility. Who make statements so reactionary and ignorant about domestic violence, about accountability, about communal care, about division of labour that you'd be forgiven for thinking you were talking to a fascist-leaning little-england nimby. Pure "i wish the big power structures could be defeated but I have no desire to interrogate how my family/community relationships are the fertile soil for those power structures to resurrect and grow every time we defeat them" energy. Real "fascism is when a guy tells me, the main character, what to do"/"i don't wanna clean my room, mom" anarchism.

This is kind of embarrassing to say as someone in her thirties but getting through this latest miserable sprint to survival has made me realise that I still don't know how to have fun or a happy life and if I don't find out soon it will probably kill me. How do people do it? How do you know what you enjoy? I slog away in videogames and read the same stupid books I always have and I watch tv and movies and it just tastes like ashes in my mouth and like i'm just waiting for my body and mind to recuperate enough energy to solve problems (be they political or material)

Tbh I think the pandemic might have already killed me. I was already working with extremely constrained variables on this front but white nondisabled ppl in the imperial core have fucked this shit up so bad I can probably just never again exist in the same space as other humans in ways that can be joyful

Gotta be some of the most ghoulish ways to abuse a child, to alienate them (through both neglect and shame and punishment) from being able to experience joy, or even know what makes them joyful

It's not like i've never had fun but it takes tremendous effort and like often a lot of planning and idk I am just a very dour person to be around and I know It's The Trauma and my fucked up class-aspirant upbringing (if you work yourself to the bone and deny yourself all pleasures you won't be poor!) but this isn't a life worth living and I don't know how to make it better. Eating food is about my only real pleasure at this point and that's good but it's not enough.

I know I should probably do the dbt worksheets. I know one of them is about a life worth living. I know. I know. I'm just so tired and it feels so hopeless.

I'm gonna regret this post I reckon.

I wanna talk about an aspect of white trans girl culture that I often see being the source of conflict and racism on here. You only really see it online and (rarely) in meatspace with trans girls who don't get out much. For the sake of argument i'm going to name it Fortress Cruelty.

I think there is a cadre of white trans girls whose idea of being cool and funny (or even just how they do rhetoric fullstop) is this kind of... aloof, contemptuous, sneering, detached, insincere, arrogant (here used to mean, won't concede ignorance or fault) spitefulness. And like tbh though I personally find that insufferable and an indicator that someone is really lonely and awkward and anxious, I def was like that when I first came out and through a lot of my twenties, and when i'm not doing well there are contexts where I slip back into it as a defense mechanism because it's a very... emotionally safe fortress from which to engage with the world. It's absolute poison for your relationships and I think kinda feeds into cultish/cult of personality stuff because it attracts people who like cruelty, watching people get torn down and creates high control scenarios, but I do get the urge and yeah, being soft as a tran in this world is a great way to get hurt constantly so yes ok sometimes one might retreat into that fortress and most of the time it's not like, morally wrong even if it's pretty toxic and annoying for anyone who's been outside more than a few times (and lbr a lot of trans women don't have the luxury of going outside esp now).

If I was to look deeper I don't really think this is often anything to do with being transfem at all, I know this is pretty standard behaviour for both people with certain early childhood traumas and also for bad faith trolls of all stripes, and in some ways it's also a kind of never-been-to-a-drag-show (please young trans women, go to some drag shows, rupaul's drag race DOES NOT COUNT) funhouse mirror imitation of drag queen culture, and I respect the effort to connect with our culture in that way even if it's faltering and misses the point (drag will always be part of our culture. again, please go to some drag shows AND STOP WATCHING RPDR).

HERE'S THE THING THOUGH

Not being a techtran (at least not in the same way as the ones on here; I work with engines and power tools more than computers) and therefore being late in the game to fedi, i've been trying to catch up on the various conflicts around racism and transmisogyny that led to the present one... And Fortress Cruelty keeps coming up as the catalyst for that conflict! I could practically write a script, and in fact I think I will!

Step one: a white trans girl (let's call her alice) is making meanspirited posts about stuff because Fortress Cruelty

Step two: one of the posts alice makes is a Fortress Cruelty post about something to do with race, racism, Black people (intentional or not, this in itself is racist)

Step three: someone gives alice the context that her post is dismissive/disrespectful/reductive/dehumanising/degrading/demeaning of [an issue related to] People of Colour. Either as a call in or call out or it just comes up as further info in dialog with someone.

Step four: instead of being like oh my bad I didn't know that i'll look into it (which most of the time would be the end of it), Alice doubles down on the Fortress Cruelty and says more shit from a position of confident complacency, and/or goes on a subtooting rant about people strawmanning her or tells people upset to kill themselves or whatever, because admitting fault or ignorance is not on the table when you are in the Fortress.

Step five: people are obviously now pissed because alice is being all kinds of racist and using basically every accountability evasion rhetorical trick in the book to avoid engaging with that, BECAUSE ADMITTING FAULT OR IGNORANCE IS NOT ON THE TABLE WHEN YOU ARE IN THE FORTRESS. A mealy mouthed nonpology given out of one side of her face while she keeps talking shit is on the table, so long as it doesn't necessitate meaningful admission of fault or ignorance.

Step six: the earlier steps can pretty much repeat indefinitely, if a nonpology was given that will be pointed to as evidence anyone still pissed at her is acting in bad faith and probably is a transmisogynist (and lbr at this point the white tma jackals will have shown up to bait the angry tranny, so some of her critics ABSOLUTELY will be acting in bad faith), examples of hypocritical moderation/critique double standards will be brought up, etc etc.

Step seven: any trans women who are also living in Fortresses of Cruelty will start making aloof overconfident insincere mocking/degrading armchair observer posts about what's going on, sometimes backing up Alice sometimes just mocking/degrading the very fact anyone is having conflict (this is both racist AND pick-me behaviour imo). If Alice's Fortress Cruelty has attracted her a nice little cult of personality, those in it will likely be making Fortress Cruelty posts about the conflict, about racism, about the thing Alice's original post was about, about the people criticising her. If her circle has any ops/cryptofascists in it (and tbh being in these circles is, I suspect, a pretty good place for an op/crypto to hide and go to work) they will privately/secretsly be harassing/abusing PoC involved in the conflict to amp things up and make everyone look unreasonable/reactions look disproportionate, possibly playing both sides and doing this to the trans women involved, too. Both her cultists and the ops/cryptos will be doing public things that are... racist in ways that are hard to prove or where the racism is hard to spot without all the context, or that are hard to say whether they're racist or not, so they can both upset and create unsafe feelings in PoC and bait people into criticising/moderating those things to make them look paranoid/irrational. The cultists do this because the means (gaslighting, racism) justifies the end (defending their friend) regardless of the consequences (more racism, more conflict) and the ops/cryptos do this because it advances their larger goal of a white/segregated fedi, destabilised anarchist/resistance communities and removing trans people from public life.

Step eight: this whole thing can now loop, fractally, recursively and indefinitely, with new Fortress of Cruelty comments and new bad faith defensiveness and new instances of people not understanding that the REACTION to the initial racism is why people aren't letting it go. People start defederating from the servers of people who did the initial racism AND the servers of people who went to bat for those people, the ops and racist transmisogynists win as new defensive conflicts arise over the previous defensive conflicts.

I think this post is already long enough so i'll save the What We Can Do About It analysis for another time but as a stopgap, I am once again reminding you that if your trauma/coping mechanisms/mental illness/ways of keeping yourself safe cause you to be racist or instigate huge conflicts where PoC get hurt or harassed, and you choose not to pursue recovery and change with all your energy, you are racist. You have a moral obligation to try to get better if you not getting better leads to racism. DBT worksheets are available for free online. Other older trans women who have walked this road will help you if you swallow your pride, take one goddamn step outside the fortress and admit you need/ask for help. A good therapist for trans women is hard to find and can be expensive but they do exist and if you're on a tech salary there's no financial excuse. I know people who've had good success in peer-led self therapy groups also. If your masto experience is centered around one or a few central big name trans girls who act like this, look into the BITE model of cults (of personality) and watch some of innuendostudios The Alt Right Playbook videos on how to avoid getting radicalised into the alt right (because that is the eventual endpoint of all cults and of all racism for whites because the number one predictor of falling into alt right pipelines is ISOLATION and if you don't get your soul right wrt racism you WILL end up isolated).

And good god do not trot out nonBlack PoC who condone this shit to/about Black people specifically or do the same thing to Black people specifically as reasons why it's Fine, Actually. I am not here to tell nonBlack PoC what to do or what to think but we don't get to use them as tokens or a point scoring exercise or a cudgel to hurt Black people.

If it needs saying, centering disabled people absolutely means being hostile to users not masking in public or running events without enforced mask policies

I am once again saying that I think being stuck on kolektiva is going to leave me stuck federated with the racists as we gradually move, falteringly and with conflict, to a place of safety and accountability on fedi, and I am still taking suggestions for servers I might have a better time on. the server would have to:

center trans women
center dykes
center disabled people
center Black people
center PoC
center survivors, esp csa survivors
center people in the "global south" (imperial periphery)
be against government
be against capital
be against ecocide
be against tyranny
be against slavery
not be weird and prudish about sex and nudity
be up for conflict and active moderation
be hostile to reply guys
encrypt its backups AT REST (jfc kolektiva)
have an onion site
be hostile to police cooperation, not keep logs, not hand data to feds
ideally, have a canary

this shouldn't be a big ask. I know it is right now, though, and that's why inertia has me stuck here on this sinking ship

I don't know how anyone can look at the uk gov statement in the FT about encryption as a win, they're still claiming they know it's possible to surveil e2ee comms, they're passing the law as-is, they're just making a nonperformative promise not to do it, cross my heart and hope to die. How gullible do you have to be to think this is anything but pr to get companies not to pull their apps and to force through an evil bill?

Also that quote from the nspcc is chilling, gov clearly has people inside the org pushing their anti encryption agenda and framing.

if you know your trauma is making you act in bigoted, eugenicist, genocidal, dehumanising ways (or if you actively shut down people trying to bring you to this knowledge), choosing not to act on that is a fascistic decision and selecting which fascists get a hug/patient talking to and which get the bat shouldn't come down to whether they're your friend/comrade, you like them, you hold the same privilege as them... It should come down to the most effective way to stop them acting like a goddamn fascist. And for fuck sake stop trying to get cripples to empathise with the people who are the reason we CANNOT EXIST IN PUBLIC OR TOUCH OUR LOVED ONES RIGHT NOW

If you are aware that the correct prognosis for someone whose fear of housing scarcity leads them to anti migration attitudes is a bat to the face, I am confused why you are applying a different logic to people who have covid trauma leading them into anti-crip attitudes. Could it be that you don't think about disabled people outside of the frame of pity/charity (where we get only what scraps you are comfortable giving us, where you remain in control of what you do for us)? Who can say

Im confused why, according to nondisabled leftists, we're supposed to show kinds of empathy and patience to people participating in (wilful ignorance of) the covid eugenics program out of fear trauma avoidance etc, that those same people never insist we extend to any other kind of reactionary or liberal. What could it mean?

Really troubling the the socialist worker party (trotskyist cult famous for rape coverups) is making inroads into trans rights protests, you see more and more of their "trans rights now!" placards at demos (they hand them out, I don't think there are many trans swappies... Yet) and it has me really worried for these silly lil trans kids carrying them. Learn your history, look up comrade delta.

so now we know mastodon.world is punishing its black users who respond to racism and letting people on .social harass them, can we defederate? @admin

I think the big thing for me about leftists who don't mask is like, if you won't subject yourself to that mild inconvenience how are you going to expect me to believe you won't rat us all out to the feds if you get busted? You'll risk jail to protect your comrades but you won't put some paper over your face because it doesn't feel nice and requires effort? I'm sure you'll last ages in interrogation. I'm sure a plea bargain would never tempt you.

You're telling me if you can't make rent this month and a cop tells you he'll give you £5k in cash for some video footage of our meeting you'll turn him down... But if you get asked to wear a mask you just can't bring yourself to endure such hardship? Ok babe.

At this point if you have the info and don't act on it I just assume you're a snitch.

Only semi related but telling me you don't use signal is a great way to tell me you're either
a) not doing any organising
b) telling me your organising is all extremely surveilled