Notices by Anti. 🐘 (antiaall3s@chaos.social), page 9

"Taylor Swift and her entourage thought it would be fine to move forward with a concert in Brazil during a catastrophic heat wave with heat indexes reaching 137F degrees. It's only spring there. They ended winter with temperatures above 100F. To call it irresponsible is an understatement.

Sure enough, one of her fans died."

https://www.okdoomer.io/climate-change-just-ruined-a-taylor-swift-concert/

If rant.li is down, which it has been today for a while already, here are some mirrors:

https://lettertoourcomrades.bearblog.dev

https://web.archive.org/web/20231102142409/https://rant.li/atlettertoourcomradesatrant-li/an-open-letter-to-our-anarchist-socialist-and-radical-leftist-comrades

[Thanks to @maxi for this link!]

Our open letter is now available as a zine, as a PDF either print-ready in black&white or web-readable in color.

"There will be no anti-capitalist revolution (whatever form it might take) without anti-ableism and antieugenics."

https://archive.org/details/open-letter-to-our-comrades-zine/

#Anarchy #Disability #AntiAbleism #Ableism #COCID19 #Zine #CommunalCare #RadicalCommunalCare

"We’ve seen how easily our existence becomes expendable to them when the actions necessary to keep us safe clash with their ideological preferences.

The ruling class truly does believe in a eugenicist survival of the fittest world. This is no longer in doubt.

We should not accept this. [Neither should we] settle for the least worst leadership options.

We’re running out of time for the kinds of compromises many of us have relied on to bring incremental change."

https://donotpanic.substack.com/p/let-the-bodies-pile-high

“This book mobilises anti-capitalist, ‘mad’, disability justice and anti-racist thinking in particular to carve out a radical political approach to mental health. It names the capitalist economic system, specifically, as a significant producer of suffering in contemporary life. Capitalism, a system characterised by private ownership, wage labour, competition and the pursuit of profit, harms each and every one of us.”
~ Frazer-Carroll, Micha
Mad World

#CurrentlyReading

“Capitalism birthed even the most commonplace social structures in which we distribute care, abuse and resources. It is no coincidence that the Western capitalist nuclear family unit is the institution that psychoanalysts have long located at the epicentre of our neuroses. Intimate relationships and marriages – another normalised economic unit – often produce trauma.”

“When we frame mental health in such a way, we bolster the idea that it is each person’s individual responsibility to stay well by seeking out therapists, psychiatrists, psychologists, doctors, self-help books, crisis lines and more recently apps and self-care gurus, many of which are becoming increasingly ubiquitous and profitable in the neoliberal era.”

“In the current climate, we still largely discuss mental health in terms of individual identity (something we are) and property ownership (something we have) – rather than as a form of collective oppression (something that is done to us). Even in political spaces that are suspicious of state authority, deference to psychiatric ideas is very much the norm. We are scared to touch mental health, usually out of fear of getting the ‘science’ wrong.”

“In this climate, it is Madness that will help us burst beyond the ‘rational’ confines of the asylum, of the prison, of capitalism and individualism. As the world drives us increasingly Mad, it is crucial that we take Mad knowledge seriously, and acknowledge its imaginative potential. This journey began when I woke up in a dissociative dream. I believe various forms of dissociation, dreaming and escape from this world are the only way to transform it.”

“Over 50,000 people are still detained under the Mental Health Act each year,59 legislation that makes it possible to lock people up in psychiatric facilities without their consent. When people are hospitalised under section, many are still routinely subject to abuse, forced treatment, restraint and other violations in bodily autonomy. Many other Mad/Mentally Ill people are now incarcerated in prisons.”

"We see contradictory statements about stigma all the time when people talk about mental health, for example, some people say they experience stigma because they take medication, others say they experience stigma because they don’t take medication. In actuality, both groups are experiencing sanism because of their supposedly spoiled identity.”

“Psychiatric knowledge is also frequently damaging because of the dominance and power it holds in society. It is positioned as expert knowledge – bolstered by the institutional authority of science and medicine – and is therefore seen as more legitimate than knowledge that comes from people without power. [..] This power stems from the fact that, like the rest of medicine, psychiatry is seen to reveal internal, apolitical and ahistorical truths about our bodyminds, when, in actuality, >

its claims are socially and historically contextual, and closely tangled up in the demands of capitalist society.”

“[..] we cannot ever definitively know mental health, and so many of the ways we currently try to know it are restricted, oppressive or depoliticising. They represent but a sliver of what is actually possible – and when we see these as the only options, we narrow the imagination.”

“Suffering follows the political contours of our lives. As the climate crisis accelerates and economic crises become more frequent, we are not short of possible explanations for the global surge in mental distress. It also follows that mental distress affects us unevenly, counter to mainstream narratives that tell us that ‘mental health does not discriminate’.”

“Our mental health cannot be disentangled from the intertwined systems of white supremacy, ableism, gendered oppression, imperialism & capitalism. All forms of what we call ‘illness’ or suffering interact with the political world – a world that is particularly deadly for certain bodyminds. Therefore, while we might all be being driven Mad, some of us are inevitably made Madder than others.”

“How we are racialised in the world has serious impacts on our bodyminds. Race sees people sorted into

socially significant categories like employable or unemployable, trustworthy or criminal, legal or illegal, intelligent or unintelligent, beautiful or ugly, exploiter or exploited, coloniser or colonised, rich or poor. People who are not read as white accumulate small and large bruises as we simply try to move through the world: we are more likely to live in poverty, to be subject to policing and its violence, to be incarcerated, to be deprived of knowledge about our histories, to experience >

discrimination at work, and to develop particular physical illnesses.”

“The systematic diagnosis of schizophrenia among Black people was further used to pathologise their direct and organised responses to systemic racism. In the 1960s, the US psychiatrists Walter Bromberg and Franck Simon suggested that Malcolm X and the civil rights movement had sparked a wave of violent schizophrenic symptoms and paranoid ‘racial antagonism’ in Black Americans.”

"Under capitalism, being able to sell our labour is the definition of mental health, with ‘work’ being referenced almost 400 times in the DSM-5.54 As a result, the common denominator between almost all experiences categorised as Mental Illness is that they, in some way or another, diminish our productivity in work or education (or are otherwise disruptive to the social order in capitalist society).”

Mad World, Micha Frazer-Carroll

THIS. BOOK. IS. SO. GOOD!!!1!!!!

Mad World, Micha Frazer-Carroll

"Since illness is constructed in the shadow of production, employers, the education system and the welfare state centre diagnosis just as much as medical and psychiatric institutions. Diagnosis is the arbitrary standard we must meet – a means of ‘bio-certification’ – that the state uses to separate the deserving from the undeserving. You may therefore need a diagnosis to get your benefits granted or to gain other forms of government support; or to get reasonable adjustments in education.”