@hakan_geijer There's a joke from a cartoon where one of the main characters, totally wracked by indecision and doubt has the epiphany - "There's nothing more dangerous than a man who knows what he wants".
Once its decided, everything else follows.
@hakan_geijer There's a joke from a cartoon where one of the main characters, totally wracked by indecision and doubt has the epiphany - "There's nothing more dangerous than a man who knows what he wants".
Once its decided, everything else follows.
@hakan_geijer Thanks for the notice - it's something that gnaws at me because I was very much in the lamentable 'nobody is doing anything' place for most my life, but basically paralyzed from extending myself into anything that was at least trying to.
2019, I finally started taking baby steps putting myself out there with lending a hand to campaigns and an org, and by June of 2020, it was full on strides that were kind of drawn out of me by circumstance and conditions and what I did in 2019 was obviously always going to be inadequate and playing around the edges of where the game really was afoot.
I posit the reason so many of us did turn out in 2020 is that we hadn't tasted the sting of defeat directly ourselves, lotsa shit was happening all at once, and there was some daylight of potential with the just-so reckoning of 'what the fuck do we gotta lose, fuck the cops, fuck The State, fuck everything - its lies and oppression top to bottom' and we got stymied to a huge degree in effect. We collectively accelerated retirements and transfers to a degree and I'm still gonna wag my tongue that SPD doesn't have all the the brutes it says it needs and once had, but...no Big Obvious Direct Wins in hand for the effort.
This is all to say that if you're on the bench waiting for a team or the team to pull it together so you might walk onto the field and play yourself...ahp ahp ahp, doesn't work like that. The first to the field aren't running out headlong because they think they'll win, but the effort is worth it even in potential defeat and long odds for a win.
Other insurrectionary movements generally, quite generally, usually work in reverse where you have predicate community that moves into the shadows for fight, rather than starting in the shadows entirely as strangers. Just saying.
I felt this in 2020, where I was like...there is way less here operationally than stated or even imagined, like we really are making half this shit up as we go along, and it is what it is, lets give a good fight and make it hell out there.
A huge element of that is personal Opsec and this peekaboo game of those being on the ball not wanting the daylight that reveals them being so on the ball and attracting eyeballs to their set, but...it certainly makes movement building in the shadows where the seasoned and adept are basically ghosts kinda difficult, ya know?
https://kolektiva.social/@ricardoharvin@mstdn.social/111183789414113238
This kinda thing bothers me too but I also feel it in my core sometimes...
One of the engagement dynamics present is this kind of 'Bandwagon Observer' POV, where you if you are not functionally in the trenches fighting the good fight, you don't appreciate that anyone is because you aren't there to witness and fight.
And extended, if there is not an open offer or open gate access to join something in the trenches that also has obvious self evident potential to fight for big wins, it's nothing at all, just parochial discontent.
So there's a defeatist truth on the table that nothing really has a puncher's chance out there, and is actively throwing the big haymakers that connect, and that is there for them to join up with and maybe bring a buddy or two along. And it stinks and is alienating and defeatist, but...
It hints at a large engagement problem that Bandwagoners have - if you only wanna back winners who have won and show potential to win even more, you will always be a day late and they'll be dead because Power doesn't suffer winners who won against them for very long.
And we are certainly not of the mentality, yet, of 'Next Comrades Up' which certainly is grim but how you make a sort of peace with fight.
@anarchopunk_girl @MnemosyneSinger @anarchistquotes
It has to be a conscious thing you keep in mind and monitor. FWIW, I think my eating cycle and addiction to nicotine are what keep me from going past 145-150 even when times are flush.
But if you're just up and skipping a meal you never have before, it's rough and feels terrible until you either break or make it a thing (or cheat like me with way too many stims because stims are magic to me).
Experientially, I wish I could enjoy breakfast foods again, but now my gut says no even if it smells so good. It mumbles about 'you'll have a nice lunch and then a great dinner, stay cool'
@MnemosyneSinger @anarchistquotes
That one drove me up a wall, like, I skipped breakfast the day I started having to pay for it with my own money, and despite what acolytes of intermittent fasting say, no, it's not great.
@anarchopunk_girl It's the self flattery of losers who are losing.
Starting a service where I follow you around badgering you about not being conscientious enough, because you do want to be conscientious, don't you? It'd be a real shame if you weren't. Grave consequences if you weren't.
It's absolutely trying that the only opposition in electoral space does the supposed impossible with kind of obvious disadvantage in overall support, and Democrats can only chalk it up to 'we are more honorable and more steward minded than them' and then both those things are shown to be self flattering lies.
@hakan_geijer I don't unfortunately - it seems pretty cut and dried that at a high level Russia is the aggressor invading for its own internal reckoning and a general principle of a Nation State engaging in self defense holds here so it's kind of hard to argue that there was a peaceable way out that simply wasn't taken...so there really isn't a contrarian angle folks are willing to pick up and put their name to.
Like Tankies et al go all sorts of outlandish places with that stuff in notional support of Russia.
However, my take since the start has been, American Liberals in particular are going outlandish places with their notional support of Ukraine that have reflected domestic engagement and disposition with things like 'Self defense means anything goes' and 'You don't get to choose who your defenders are, so what if they've got SS bolts tattooed on their eyelids, this is war!' and thirstily hoping Putin receives a comeuppance for all the chicanery he's pulled off over the decades, and it's like...
War brings out the worst in people, maybe especially the spectators that don't really have a dog in it, but use it as a divining tool as if they do.
@hakan_geijer Anti-war in what way, and with what audience in mind? What's the combo of rhetoric that would pick your lock?
That's why its such a shitty dynamic! It's white people going 'we do this one thing here to compensate for something over there' and then other white people going 'okay, so then I can shortcut to what I want by preying on that' and then all the white people who abide this dynamic up until this point then resolving they have to play fucking detective on everyone that doesn't tow their line that they are who they say they are.
This is something over time that has really gnawed at me, given this kind of 'do you have standing to talk about it' test that is basically a step 1 or step 2 of interacting politically and partisanly online.
And it cuts a lot of ways in slipshod manner. So for some that are cognizant of larger offline social dynamics relating to marginalized and oppressed peoples, the impulse to give automatic standing is present and given, BUT is litigated around claims that one is faking who they say they are, and there are enough True Positives of people faking to keep it up.
It feels like such a ridiculous shortcut, where you're not withholding on elevating voices, you're questioning whether the voice is a legitimate/authentic voice and picking apart an identity to other and outgroup the other party in a discourse. So you don't have to elevate them per some kind of principle of compensating for the shit that offline society dishes out, you can disrule the other party from belonging to that marginalized cohort at all. It's a cheap fucking trick and it's endemic to everything. It's pops up in racial discourse, gender discourses, queer discourses that if you aren't talking some Liberal/Progressive Soup, you don't belong to the larger racial/gender/queer cohort at all. And we know that isn't true, but it's to debase standing on subject.
Some are on such a rote routine of turning off their brains to adhere to that magnanimous principle, that they wind up contorting notions of intersectionality to be unilateral escape clauses for themselves or an avatar that speaks for them.
Some are so petrified of stepping on toes and their social reputation maligned they'll take up bad causes and dogpile others along one line, only to play defense the next day on that same line, and for what?
I really fucking hate how the game goes online sometimes and why I am so persistent that some kind of online social intimacy has to backed up with offline social intimacy. And if it isn't backed up, then stock isn't put into it as much and certainly not at parity with a living person right in front of you.
Otherwise you can go really bad monolithizing/tokenizing places and orient everything around meta appearances and engagement.
I really do feel a lot of this emanates from overcompensating obtuse Prog/Libs, like you see the same standing thing and outgrouping towards Black mainline conservatives to out-in-the-open-and-loving-it fascists, but because they aren't in closer proximity for just talking about it and might actually be up for grabs in Prog/Lib Theories of Politics involving Electoralism, they get the Uncle Tom Treatment rather than questioning whether they are indeed Black at all online behind an avatar.
@AnthonyJK Half the reason there are white people out there faking being Black online is because they are part of an online social ecosystem that grants standing based on that, like, if that wasn't how the entire ecosystem operated, there might not be an impulse to fake it just to say what you wanna say, without need for identity cladding for gravitas.
@anarchopunk_girl that was a very very good read, thanks!
@anarchopunk_girl 2nd Paragraph is exactly why Twitter without any purposeful intent to support Black Twitter, was so fucking good despite being awful in so many ways: Putting someone you didn't already know in your orbit to see if you wanted to be moots.
And this was not by algorithm and suggesteds but by the actual sharing mechanisms and open arena structure where everyone could in theory somehow bump into one another. Even if you started forming trusted clique camps after some time, there was potential that you would not be buried in the clique camp away from others.
And of course federation starts from the almost opposite premise where you self select for your clique camp first (choose wisely!), and then whether the camp as a whole is allowed to other clique camps or not.
This leapt out to me and even as some tear out their hair about others remaining on Twitter to this day, if it wasn't for some absolutely boneheaded structural things with Twitter, I might still be there because even by sheer accident, it delivers heterogenous day in the life reporting and joking.
@anarchopunk_girl @neonsnake yeah, the thing that I am never sure of with people, being someone who absolutely babytalks our kitty with silly rhetorical questions, is to what extent people actually believe their little critter companion is cognizant in human ways and how much of that is something more latent and vestigal subconcious thing.
And its not being sure when combined with seeming ethical and moral launchoff points where some logic is 'if humans are animals, and animals are given the short stick on their own cognition, then it is wrong to exploit them, hurt them, eat them, etc etc' where I become dubious. Not because I disagree with the endpoint and some means to get there so much, but because it feels like a crock of shit to feign agnosticism towards there being any way to differentiate ourselves from animals simply to justify kindness and care towards them, and larger drastic ecological stewardship (that might chap our hides alone) to live up to those ideals.
I know this is kinda hokey being much more of a consequentialist than otherwise but part of that is all the attendant beliefs with myopic ferocity where it really starts to fall apart for me, where I dont percieve any of ego or association or reputational benefits from taking the whole implicative must dos to heart. I dont feel wholler, sounder, and wiser with any of it nor imagine I would if I was like 'hey babe, lets go full vegan full time'.
As for people who think they live with an Advanced Lassie or are hilariously wrong about LLMs to detrimental effect, I think that resides less on a conscious moral ethical side and is just quick n easy 'humans make anything into a visage of itself even if it isnt and despite absurdity' and I am reminded of the time Conan O'Brien had The Sears Tower on his show while visiting Chicago and like, it was an anthropomorphic plush suit wearing a shirt and pants and it was hella funny, for human reasons.
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