Notices by CedarTea (cedartea@mstdn.ca), page 2

@hakan_geijer I think you might be onto something with ~5 days. For me, the headspace of the first few days is definitely different than after that and I would put the inflection point at around 4 or 5 days in my experience. The speed of time just feels so altered after that point.

Thinking about starting a mutual aid group in my little rural town. Anyone feel like bombarding me with resources and/or advice?

#anarchism #mutualaid #rural

@hakan_geijer Yeah that really only exists in a few places in the lower 48 and I don't think they're common enough destinations to really drive the gear market or the discussions. There's a lot fewer people going into the backcountry of Montana than Yosemite or whatever.

@hakan_geijer There are a few places in the northern states in the Rockies that have glaciers but it's a pretty small subset. More in Canada but even still, glaciers are pretty regional. Otherwise yeah, ice and snow are seasonal issues pretty much everywhere in Canada and for some parts of the US. The ultralight crowd are mostly all in town during winter though.

@hakan_geijer I have the same problems trying to plan my backcountry trips here in Canada. Everything is geared toward groomed trails in California so they stress weight as the only meaningful performance value. Where I go, weight certainly does matter but reliability, field maintainability, and fitness for environmental conditions are all much more important.

@hakan_geijer
A little offended at the paw's implication that ancaps are part of anarchism

@julieofthespirits

On the ever-recurring discussions on authoritarianism and leftist factionalism, I can't help but return to the story of a family friend who defected to Canada from Cuba. His family being poor black Habaneros, they benefited a lot from Castro's social programs he never could have received under Batista - this is not the story of some bitter expropriated landed reactionary.

What did he say was his biggest source of stress and anxiety when he came to Canada?

#anarchism #communism

Was it racism? No. He certainly experienced it, but he was used to that.

Was it poverty and wage labour? No. He was certainly poor, but he was able to cobble a living together and was used to lean times.

What constantly stressed him out was the freedom to make his own life choices. In Cuba, he tested well in math so they made him an engineer. They told him what university to attend, what his job would be, and where to live. Now he had to make these decisions himself.

Made all the worse is that, under capitalism, these decisions can leave you entirely dispossessed through no fault of your own. And surely his lack of social network made those risks all the greater.

What kind of systems are these that leave the working class afraid of their own freedom? How can either of these be described as projects of liberty and flourishing for the working class? His stories of living in both worlds have had a deep impact on me.

On the one hand, we have our capitalist Canadian society, where workers are "free" only in the sense that we can work or starve in the cold. And they don't even have the decency to guarantee us that we'll have that opportunity.

And the Cuban case? A trap. You'll have a job for sure. Plant your sugar. Don't worry your pretty little head, the glorious leaders of the revolution will take care of everything. Just plant your sugar. For the revolution.

And so we swing back around to the dictatorship of the proletariat. The glorious leaders say that they only need control for a little while, then they'll give it up for a beautiful stateless society. When the workers are finally ready.

Yet living in Cuba was *exactly* what made my friend unready to take up that mantle. The so-called dictatorship of the proletariat left him immeasurably *less* ready for that world, generously assuming the glorious leaders ever even decided to offer it to him.

When anarchists say that means are inseparable from ends, this is the story that always cements that for me. You cannot build a stateless society of the working class by empowering the state and disempowering the working class. Even the most well-meaning attempt is a self-defeating dead end. We constantly build the world.

So how do workers defend our gains?

The only way we ever have or ever could.

A las barricadas

#anarchism #communism

@AnarchoNinaWrites
They get a lot of rhetorical/positional value out of punching left too. By positioning themselves against communism, they get to say "we're not radical like those crazy NDP... we're responsible and safe and boring" and Canadians eat that shit up. We fucking love boring here, and we'll take boring over doing the right thing every single time.

@AnarchoNinaWrites
Absolutely. It means a lot of careful rhetorical maneuvering since we don't want to set off the wave of anti-immigrant violence that the right seems all too willing to stoke. Caring means nuance, and nuance is frustrating.

@AnarchoNinaWrites
Canadian immigration policy prioritizes those with money and education, so we scoop up a lot of other countries' petite bourgeoisie. This class is typically fertile ground for fascist organizing around the world, so those politics end up overrepresented. Similar in a lot of ways to the anticommunism of the Cuban diaspora in Florida. That said, some of our immigrant communities are also the most dynamic labour organizers we have.

@abolisyonista
I'm constantly amazed at how much old radical literature is littered with what is essentially subtweets. Time is a flat circle.