Notices by William Gillis 🏴 (rechelon@mastodon.social), page 3

How we got here was libs and leftists incessantly downplaying the existence of fascists as a marginal fringe that could never matter. But the "Right Wing Death Squads" and "the natural order is warlords raping young men and eating them" folks really do constitute millions now.

4) transphobia is intense and rabidly popular rn as a blowback to progress, 5) mild personal inconveniences and changes to every day life during COVID radicalized people for life, 6) the left keeps pratfalling with horrifically bad analysis, and yes 7) inflation sucks.

We're dealing with a huge number of hardened fash who are not going to see the light. They will likewise exploit any vulnerability they can find. If they think we haven't prepared to make civil war or genocide sufficiently painful for them, they will embrace such.

The fash have been crowing for a long time about getting gen-z men, and they're not wrong. Simple reactionary arguments win out over more complicated true arguments with kids, locking them into fashy media ecosystems, and shallow leveraging of selfish entitlement works.

The notion that there's some vast base that could have tapped had the libs not been so fashy is itself liberal delusion; it allows folks to think the electoral system can be saved and to fantasize about the Dems "learning a lesson" and respecting some leftist (non)voting bloc.

Harris lost piles of votes because of how rabidly complicit the Biden administration is in the genocide in Gaza and how utterly callous she is. But if she had said "a Palestinian child is worth even a thousandth of an Israeli life" she probably would have lost MORE zionist votes.

We need to build science-from-the-bottom participatory structures to spread common contact with objective reality rather than relying on academia or institutions (cf those built by Dalits in India).

We need to focus on normalizing better epistemic obligations and tools.

Yes, we need to continue outreach, even to the privileged, streamlining our argumentation and resources for middle schoolers, gamers, boomers, etc who might get sniped by the 101 level arguments that leverage their ignorance and selfishness.

We have to catalyze large social spaces both offline and on that are not overrun by lowest common denominator, so that anarchist-influenced social norms can gel and activist tacit knowledge can compound without wasting time constantly fighting 101 level discourse brushfires.

The pull of simplistic arguments that ask nothing of you is also how the left is in increasingly worse shape, rotted out with nationalism, tankies, and the shallowest nonprofit idpol, while enthusiastically echoing obvious absurdities from grifters collecting paychecks for it.

So we're officially off to the races in ethnic cleansing. In the US, in Ukraine, in Palestine.

There is no institutional check you can pray to. No moral value they will continue to feign deference before. And most liberals will never wake up, because they can survive the worst.

And now that Israel is undertaking a much more active genocide, and images of people burned to death in hospitals is actually circulating. Now that the world is seeing the grotesque nationalistic horror I witnessed as a child when zionists laughed about Rachel Corrie pancakes.

Now the non sequitur interruption is "even noting that Hamas is reactionary is counter-revolutionary and pro-imperialist!"

I've hated Israel so much and for so long.

When I turned against Irish nationalism in middle school, and said "wait, all ethnonationalisms are wrong," people would interrupt with "Israel has a right to exist!"

When the Patriot Act was passed I said "no state can protect you" and they interrupted "ISRAEL HAS A RIGHT TO DEFEND ITSELF!"

When I tagged "migrants welcome: abolish borders" over caged children, you guessed it, "NO JEW IN THE WORLD IS SAFE WITHOUT ISRAEL'S TERRITORIAL INTEGRITY."

This is a great index of targets for activists:

https://www.surveillancewatch.io/

To *not* be aggressively building tens of millions of additional housing units in every city in the global north and opening all borders is to be directly and actively planning the biggest genocide in human history.

Anyone pro national borders is a straight up genocidaire.

Listening to Steve Fuller confidently lecture that Nick Land says technological progress is good because it will cause a catastrophe that will stop technology and return humans to nature. Lord, may I never be granted the kind of confident ignorance of an academic grifter.

@jindra @whatanerd @hakan_geijer

Currently the line of at least one prominent publisher is "we'll secretly try to upload everything to libgen and won't pick fights with TAL hosting it but don't want to make it front and center because it'll piss off authors and lose us sales."

I think there's clear evidence that online copies diminish sales, but that creates the moral question of WHY did folks buy only when they had no other options.

@jindra @whatanerd @hakan_geijer

No studies within the anarchist scene. The profit margins are -- generally -- so hair thin plus collective process inclines orgs towards conservatism that no one wants to do risky things. But beyond that it's not really a mass market where you could do real studies uncluttered by noise. Each book is generally very different. Plus it's a hard sell to an author who is going to get peanuts anyway.

@jindra @whatanerd @hakan_geijer

That said, the evidence as such is more or less that in a space where books sell 50-800 copies, if you put the book online for free, often that immediately removes the majority of the buyers who are only going to pick it up on a lark in hopes of eventually reading it, without actually reading it.

This flips in the other direction when a book is such that it is able to build attention and importance via distribution.

@jindra @whatanerd @hakan_geijer

This is not apologetics on my part, to be clear, I don't think these business reasons trump the various ethical reasons to release PDFs. And as I said, things flip for big hot ticket attention-grabbing items that can build steam on their own. But like the little historian who wrote a volume on a tiny corner of anarchist history might not get more than 10 sales without the benefit of the above tricks to increase sales.