What an amazingly succinct summary of the moral nihilism that undergirds fascism.
Notices by William Gillis ๐ด (rechelon@mastodon.social), page 2
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William Gillis ๐ด (rechelon@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 31-Oct-2023 13:52:20 JST William Gillis ๐ด -
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William Gillis ๐ด (rechelon@mastodon.social)'s status on Monday, 30-Oct-2023 05:59:24 JST William Gillis ๐ด Anarchism's seen a pile of successes when it comes to correctly predicting the future (eg how marxism would go wrong), inventing new strategies and tools (eg signal, the getaway car), and prefigurative experimentation (eg polyamory, veganism, wokeness, etc)
It's consistently been a catastrophic failure at mass mobilization.
So why don't we emphasize the things we're good at and abandon trying to make a billion people card-carrying members of The Anarchist Party?
*red anarchist hissing ensues*
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William Gillis ๐ด (rechelon@mastodon.social)'s status on Sunday, 29-Oct-2023 21:04:45 JST William Gillis ๐ด Similarly, it would be really annoying to deal with the self-proclaimed "nihilist anarchist" faction discovering that they hold the same moral antirealist position as the AI doomer cult, allowing both camps to sharpen their rhetoric and arguments, so I passively try to avoid escalating any such crossover.
But, christ, it would be really funny if the accelerationist camp wins in practice solely because the Left just absolutely refuses to side with ontologically annoying techies.
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William Gillis ๐ด (rechelon@mastodon.social)'s status on Sunday, 29-Oct-2023 21:04:45 JST William Gillis ๐ด I am not a doomer (at least nowhere near the degree of Yud etc) but I do think the Left is kinda systematically underrating and underappreciating their arguments.
This is, however, ideologically useful for me, because it would be really fucking annoying to deal with a primitivist/degrowth + lesswrong cult alliance where they know what the other camp knows, so I facilitate this by prioritizing other projects than writing some essay to urge the broader Left to address their overcorrection.
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William Gillis ๐ด (rechelon@mastodon.social)'s status on Sunday, 29-Oct-2023 21:04:45 JST William Gillis ๐ด It's wild that AI doomerism is structured identically to standard leftist technophobia, even makes explicit appeal to the anti-nuclear movement and green theorists, but virtually the entire Left has decided it's a verboten position that must be ruthlessly mocked... purely because the most visible advocates are not just a demographic and cultural outgroup to the contemporary Left (a bunch of annoying rich silicon valley techies), but in practice the Left's number one perceived enemy.
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William Gillis ๐ด (rechelon@mastodon.social)'s status on Sunday, 29-Oct-2023 21:04:44 JST William Gillis ๐ด Of course this is not to suggest there aren't at least some token barriers to the above crossovers or hybridizations. The Two Cultures war has resulted in a large swathe of the Left being fervently attached to some variant of Vitalism, of all wingnut things. And an ontological update on said model of reality is so deeply catastrophic to their entire worldview at this point that many would rather die than admit that eg brains are just a type of computer.
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William Gillis ๐ด (rechelon@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 17-Oct-2023 22:22:41 JST William Gillis ๐ด A mandatory Joy James lecture for every single academic who says insecure billionaire nerds are the vanguard of fascism and a post-bachelors education in the humanities is the same thing as political enlightenment or relevance.
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William Gillis ๐ด (rechelon@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 17-Oct-2023 22:22:37 JST William Gillis ๐ด A reactionary billionaire says "academia bad" amid some word vomit defensively trying to puff up the techie bloggosphere as a philosophical movement, and now we've got to slog through even more tedious legions of only marginally more aware left-liberal academics preening about how they're political radicals and sneering at them is objectively fascism.
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William Gillis ๐ด (rechelon@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 13-Oct-2023 23:41:03 JST William Gillis ๐ด I encourage a certain amount of tolerance for different focuses and strategies, no one's gonna get everything right and we should have at least some compassion and grace when folks make different evaluations.
But the folks who think it's obviously mandatory for anarchists to ally with or follow reactionary authoritarian factions in Palestine against Israel, but how dare anyone suggest the same re similar reactionary authoritarians in Ukraine against Russia are just really fucking galling.
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William Gillis ๐ด (rechelon@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 10-Oct-2023 11:09:37 JST William Gillis ๐ด When someone with infinitely more power than you in the movement casually says something you intimately know is a lie.
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William Gillis ๐ด (rechelon@mastodon.social)'s status on Sunday, 08-Oct-2023 10:21:03 JST William Gillis ๐ด Three Way Fight means the Hamas soldiers dragging a corpse around of a woman they raped are absolutely firmly our enemies too.
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William Gillis ๐ด (rechelon@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 30-Sep-2023 20:40:14 JST William Gillis ๐ด Jesus fucking christ.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/sep/29/kosovo-serbian-troops-buildup-us-uk
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William Gillis ๐ด (rechelon@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 28-Sep-2023 06:18:00 JST William Gillis ๐ด Yeah, I saw people in ostensibly "anarchist" (albeit seemingly just online) circles celebrating OBVIOUS war crimes like repeatedly bombing a surrendering soldier. And "the nazis aren't a big deal" shit is completely toxic. Also there's long been backchannel whispers of some completely fucked shit re anarchist nationalism and alliances re the Donbas before the war started.
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William Gillis ๐ด (rechelon@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 28-Sep-2023 06:13:58 JST William Gillis ๐ด Yeah, I"ve not been impressed with the big texts and big names, but I think it's a position that we should take seriously DESPITE the prominent advocates, for basic anarchist ethics/strategic reasons. I also think it's a position that will become more and more conventional within the scene as time drags on and nasty consequences of Ukraine being a fucking nationstate continue to rack up.
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William Gillis ๐ด (rechelon@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 23-Sep-2023 19:48:51 JST William Gillis ๐ด Wikipedia vandalism is fun when it propagates.
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William Gillis ๐ด (rechelon@mastodon.social)'s status on Monday, 18-Sep-2023 11:19:04 JST William Gillis ๐ด Ideological communities advance their discourse and analysis internally, rarely in sustained contact with outsiders, or sometimes just a tiny set of other ideological communities.
This leads to the omnipresent inability for outsiders to critique or engage with the ideological community except in surface level analysis (which is often enough), because there's always the retreat of "well you haven't read everything."
It would be interesting to write summaries of one's community FOR CRITICISM.
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William Gillis ๐ด (rechelon@mastodon.social)'s status on Monday, 18-Sep-2023 11:19:03 JST William Gillis ๐ด Like if you had to do a literature review of an ideological community you consider yourself a part of (eg an academic field or political current), what would you present and how would you try to make it quickly accessible to get higher-quality more-informed critics?
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William Gillis ๐ด (rechelon@mastodon.social)'s status on Sunday, 17-Sep-2023 07:52:04 JST William Gillis ๐ด Russell Brand being a serial rapist is the least surprising thing ever.
Remember this scumbag is who Mark Fisher self-crucified over to stick it to the woke moralist feminists. The "vampires" were absolutely systematically right, and the folks who bible thumped his screed (and his rants against anarchists) are now primarily coked up bargain basement trad-larping trustfunders in Brooklyn.
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William Gillis ๐ด (rechelon@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 15-Sep-2023 05:28:36 JST William Gillis ๐ด If you can grasp the difference between "it's cool that I can get my tubes tied" and "let's forcibly sterilize an entire group of people," then you can grasp the vast difference between transhumanism and eugenics.
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William Gillis ๐ด (rechelon@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 14-Sep-2023 20:58:18 JST William Gillis ๐ด There's a certain section of gen-x anarchists that have long sneered that "nothing could be more obviously the polar opposite of anarchism than transhumanism" and they're absolutely right that fervent hostility to things like GMOs used to be the plumbline consensus position in the movement. But... that looked like zines from the early 80s in which they literally declare that "test tube babies" are the epitome of fascism. I'm just saying.