Notices by HeavenlyPossum (heavenlypossum@kolektiva.social), page 2

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.

@rad @MisuseCase @RD4Anarchy

Anarchism does not object to voluntary and consensual relationships that lack mechanisms of enforcement.

@holyramenempire @MisuseCase

This misconstrues the anarchist critique of authority. Voluntarily adopted roles and unenforceable decisions do not constitute hierarchy in the sense of *rule.* People taking on specified roles is more of an issue of taxonomy than of hierarchy, although we tend to colloquially use the latter term for both.

It’s popular to compare the behavior of the Israeli state in Gaza to that of Nazi Germany, probably because that is, for most people, the historical touchstone for this kind of violence.

But people don’t need to look that far away or that far back for an analogy. The closest comparison is to Israel’s neighbor and contemporary, Syria under the Bashar al-Asad regime.

Asad’s forces also use mass murder of civilians. They use sieges and starvation. They kidnap and they torture. They destroy infrastructure and bomb entire cities into ruin and rubble. They do all of this with the barest sanction from the international community and with the active support of major regional and global powers.

“The mound of discarded fabric in the middle of the Atacama weighed an estimated 11,000 to 59,000 tons, equivalent to one or two times the Brooklyn Bridge…clothing produced by the world’s most well-known brands: Nautica, Adidas, Wrangler, Old Navy, H&M, Ralph Lauren, Tommy Hilfiger, Forever 21, Zara, Banana Republic. Store tags still dangled from many of her findings.”

We have more than enough clothes for anyone who wants them; there is no material reason for people unclothed or without shoes to remain so.

People go without because of capitalism: because capitalists profit by interfering with our access to the stuff we make together. It’s more profitable for them to dump mountains of clothes in the desert than it is to let people have those items.

https://grist.org/international/burn-after-wearing-fashion-waste-chile/

@hosford42

Ok…let me think about this a bit

“There’s a roughly 50% chance that I will be ruled by a fascist tyrant by the end of this calendar year. I will prepare for this by doing absolutely nothing.”

I’m not downplaying the threat of fascism: it’s very real and has been a real and growing fact in the lives of many Americans.

I’m mocking anyone who won’t shut up about how trump poses a fascist threat but also won’t change *anything* in their life as if fascism were an actually imminent reality.

If Biden loses—or, more likely, if Trump coups his way into power—I fully expect that a lot of liberals will devote more of their energy into yelling at people online for not voting hard enough than in resisting the fascism they keep warning us is imminent.

@hosford42

The most critical thing should be building networks of like-minded people who can be trusted and the second-most critical thing should be reading about the experience of the French Resistance. Like “how do I stay safe if someone in my network is captured and tortured to reveal identities of co-conspirators.”

@simon_brooke

I figured that those schools were mostly for marks to be exploited by the grifters, not for grifters to learn their trade

Something I find fascinating is the way in which awful people seem to instinctively know how to be awful.

So like abusers tend to follow particular and predictable patterns for manipulating their victims. Groomers have these strategies for grooming. Fascists come to power in similar ways to each other. Con artists win their victims’ trust in ways remarkably similar to each other.

Do they all go to some evil villain school to learn these techniques? Or are some people just legitimately born with these instincts? I’m somewhere on the spectrum and I struggle to intuit basic social interactions, much less routinely manipulate them to my advantage.

How does that work?!

@TruthSandwich@fedi.truth-sandwich.com @jeffowski

The funniest thing about this is that the “moderate left” in TS’s comment, ie, the center-right, is explicitly opposed to meeting everyone’s basic needs.

@lumpentrashbandit @hakan_geijer

Thank you both for posting these because I hate that fucker but was leery of being on the receiving end of yet another pile-on

@hakan_geijer

I am not surprised you disagree, because most people disagree when they hear this idea. It feels so supremely contrary to our own lived, subjective experience.

But it’s true! As you noted yourself, you made the change and then adopted a belief system that accords with that change.

Religious beliefs don’t make people do bad things. They don’t make people do good things either.

Beliefs generally don’t make people do anything at all. That is, beliefs are not really *causal* to behavior. People tend to act like the people around them, the people they associate with and can observe (in person or virtually). We adopt beliefs primarily as ex post facto justifications for *why* we acted the way we did. They make it possible for us to live with our actions, but they don’t *cause* our actions.

Culture? Ideology? Religion? Not particularly useful indicators of how someone will behave.

@RD4Anarchy @violetmadder @bontchev @aral

Global deaths from air pollution have risen steadily for at least the last three decades.