Notices by HeavenlyPossum (heavenlypossum@kolektiva.social)

@MakBerberovic @arrrg

What’s a little thing like genocide anyway.

@MakBerberovic

Tl;dr

@MakBerberovic

When I criticized the Ukrainian state for its oppression, and specifically its forced conscription and prohibition on men leaving the country—conscription is, after all, slavery—I was similarly told that I was helping Russia win its imperialist war of aggression.

It was just as silly then as it is from you.

@darcher @passenger @MakBerberovic

If I make true and accurate observations, I’m not responsible for anyone else’s efforts to lie about those observations, no.

So the World Central Kitchen convoy a) cleared its route with the IDF beforehand, b) traveled on an approved route, and c) departed at an approved time, so d) the IDF knew exactly who it was killing when it struck the convoy three (3) times.

It was so obviously deliberate, and so deliberately cruel—not just to murder these people, but to terrorize other aid workers into abandoning the Palestinians to be starved to death. To prove the IDF’s impunity and reach, and to compel the IDF’s defenders into apologizing for yet another unforgivable atrocity.

I will never understand the audacity of showing up in someone’s mentions to be a condescending asshole and then being genuinely surprised when that someone mutes or blocks said asshole.

“Who could have anticipated these consequences of my own shitty actions???”

This is how you end up with the pro-capitalist right and the authoritarian left both deciding that people need to be forced to labor in socially useful ways.

This is how you get eco-fascists like Garret Hardin marrying lefty ecological concern about the environment with right wing racism and obsession with private property.

“Those other people over there are doing it wrong. They’re working the wrong way, or they’re touching the earth the wrong way, or they’re living together the wrong way. I, an enlightened being, know better than them and will teach them or force them to behave properly.”

There’s a deeply cynical and misanthropic thread among some people on the left that posits people are too *bad* in some way to live together in a way that is better than what we have now.

Too greedy, too aggressive, too shortsighted, too parochial, too irrational, too stupid, too petty.

(Never the observer, of course; they’re part of the enlightened elite who can see us as we really are, and—if they’re not too cynical—will be in charge of forcing the ignorant masses into a better world.)

It’s paralleled by a similar argument on the right, that people are genuinely terrible and so a better world is impossible because this world of hierarchy and abuse and exploitation is the best of all worlds.

Both probably owe quite a bit to the deeply Christian idea of the Fall, of people as fundamentally broken and in need of heroic redemption.

“Humans are naturally acquisitive. We want to endlessly accumulate.”

The Mbendjele BaYaka people of Central African Republic will periodically leave their camp to go start a new one and leave all their material possessions behind.

The people of Trypillia would periodically and deliberately burn their houses down and build new ones atop the rubble.

“Humans are naturally greedy and selfish.”

The Nyaka people of Uganda engage in demand sharing. If you say “I want that” about something they have, they will give it to you as readily as an American might hold a door open for a stranger.

“Humans are an invasive species that naturally over-exploits its environment with reckless and shortsighted abandon.”

The Yurok of California deliberately lived off a diet of primarily acorns, leaving many other resources un-exploited, because they were wary of the hierarchical and exploitive lifestyle of their neighbors to the north.

“Humans are naturally and myopically self-centered and descend into violent competition when resources are scarce.”

Starvation is rare among forager societies, despite the common perception that they live on the constant knife’s edge of survivability, because people in these communities tend to share with each other unless there is literally nothing left for anyone.

And I just so utterly reject this cynicism, because it’s so ugly and boring and *smug.* It’s so pointless. Humans are too terrible to save or be worth saving? Fine. You’re uniquely amazing and everyone else is awful. Go away and be smugly self-congratulating somewhere else.

In reality, humans are a giant tangle of competing impulses and motivations that can be expressed in endless combinations in endless contexts. We are *self-constructing,* able to think about and then act upon the ways we live individually and socially. This is our unique nature as one of many species of animals on earth: to *not* be bound to any particular lifeway but rather to be able to critically analyze and deliberately construct our lifeways.

The idea of human beings as rational utility-maximizing particles with insatiable hedonic desires is very much the product of an ideological project to justify capitalism as “natural” and has virtually no relationship to how actual human beings live but a lot of people have genuinely internalized it.

Trying to derive “human nature” by observing people under capitalist modernity is like looking at a bored, depressed wolf obsessively pacing a circle in a tiny zoo enclosure and concluding that this is “wolf nature.”

Virtually every state that has ever existed has failed. There are vastly more states that once were that are no longer. They were conquered, split up, overthrown, or collapsed on themselves.

There is no Holy Roman Empire. No United Arab Republic. No Confederate States of America. No Avar Khaganate. No Yugoslavia or Cisalpine Republic or Fatimid Caliphate.

Your state will probably fail someday too. Remember that the next time someone criticizes anarchism on the grounds that it would be difficult to sustain.

*All* human endeavors are difficult to sustain. Embrace change.

I saw someone on a “collapse” forum ask:

“What do you think will be the first domino to fall?”

As in, collapse hasn’t started yet, but it will soon, so we should be on the look out.

Meanwhile, the state has utterly, totally disintegrated in places like Sudan and Haiti, which just happen to be around the same latitude, the part of the world that’s projected to become physically uninhabitable from temperature increases alone within this century.

All throughout that region there are coups, insurgencies, terrorism. Burkina Faso had back-to-back coups in 2023. The state barely exists in Central African Republic or South Sudan. Huge parts of Mexico are ruled by cartels and millions of Central Americans are fleeing north.

The first domino? The first?? It fell a while ago. The weakest states—the ones that were already environmentally marginal and devastated by colonialism—in the hottest zone have already collapsed. They’re gone. They’re not really coming back, are they? But they won’t be the last.

@idzie @whatanerd

He also seems to have fallen victim to the need to have A Take about everything. Abuse! Therapy! Veganism! It’s ok to not have something to say about every conceivable issue.

It’s a popular myth that in crises people will panic and devolve into chaos. The opposite is mostly true: in times of crisis, people tend to become more, not less, pro-social. This is to our credit as a species, but it is sometimes to our detriment. I remember a story of an office full of people in the World Trade Center on 9/11, sitting down on the carpet to debate their next moves. Should they evacuate or wait there for rescue?

People want to stop, to discuss, to debate. No one wants to be seen as overreacting. It’s embarrassing. No one wants to feel embarrassed. What if you act with urgency and then discover afterwords that you didn’t need to? You will look like a fool.

Of course, if you act without urgency and then discover afterwords that you did need to, you might be dead.

“I didn’t threaten violence if I lose, I merely anticipate that other people would be violent”

This is a clever child’s logic for lawyering their way out of trouble for a threat they made. No one is under any obligation to take any of this seriously. But the prevailing preference is to pretend that the most generous interpretation of his words is the correct one, and that people really can just spend a few moments in November voting and then bear no subsequent cost.

The funniest thing about Donald Trump is that he is so routinely *honest* in public—“I will be a dictator,” “there will be violence if I lose”—and yet the majority of people are so concerned about decorum, so terrified of appearing to overreact, that the American political system just plods along as if he hadn’t said what he said.

Once, when I was living in DC, there was a fire in the metro system. A train stopped in the tunnel and started filling with smoke. An announcement came on over the speakers: stay in the train, for safety.

Eventually people were evacuated, but not before one woman died from smoke inhalation and others became sick from it.

There was a discussion on a local blog: what went wrong? I suggested that being trapped in a box filling with smoke was bad, and that I would have exited the train and tried to make for safety.

No no, I was told: that would have been dangerous. Anyway, someone in authority provided instructions. Stay in the train. Don’t leave. That might have gotten someone killed! We should listen to The Big Voice on the loudspeakers.

But staying in that box filling with smoke, at the instructions of someone in authority, literally did kill someone. She died in that train. This fact didn’t seem to register for them: the uncertainty of taking action, vs the certainty of following orders.

The fear of being embarrassed about overreaction is more powerful than the certainty of death for some people.

@TomSwirly

We are habituated to obedience, like circus animals fearful of the lash

@RD4Anarchy @rad @MisuseCase

There is, of course, an enormous world of difference between the sort of management or leadership role someone might adopt voluntarily, with the revocable consent of their peers, with no enforcement mechanism—like a sports team captain—and the hierarchy (literally: “rule by the sacred priests”) to which anarchists object.

Most critiques of anarchism as utopian assume that anarchists believe anarchism is “self-sustaining” or operates out of some intrinsic sense of altruism. In reality, egalitarianism, just like hierarchy, is a social choice that requires constant work to sustain.