cozbi the daughter of zur

i see a lot of men who want to be feminist allies talking about rejecting or overcoming their...

Fri, 05 Aug 2011 02:32:00 -0400

i see a lot of men who want to be feminist allies talking about rejecting or overcoming their privilege. i feel it is important to point out that literally the only way for you to do this is to live as a woman 24/7/365 for the rest of your life, which is not a project i expect any of you are capable of undertaking (unless you’re already a trans woman, in which case i’d just be calling you a feminist and would never insult the shit out of you by calling you a male ally)

trans women are socially threatened in a way that few other people are because patriarchy absolutely cannot tolerate their existence. it literally attempts to destroy them, like an adaptive immune response to the presence of a pathogen. and with good reason — trans women really do represent an existential threat to patriarchy because a society that accepts trans women as women qua women is fundamentally incompatible with patriarchy. this is why you should make every effort to practice that acceptance

this is also why, if you call yourself a feminist or ally but can’t accept trans women as women even on the internet, or if you think it’s okay to joke about them or to tolerate harassment of them anywhere, it’s pretty clear to me that you’re a reactionary fuckunit and any feminist views you may have expressed were just due to your learning which arguments to parrot in order to camouflage your real nature, and so you can go fuck yourself with a chainsaw imo. and by that i mean you need go get enlightened by someone else who has the saintly patience to put up with your toxic bullshit, because personally, i just want to hurt you

anyway: tangent. the point is, as long as you’re male, you will have privilege, and there is nothing you can do to reject that or overcome that. it’s not something you have any control over — your privilege is granted by other people’s responses and reactions to the fact of your maleness, not because of anything you do, and is therefore a birthright which you as a man cannot refuse

what you can do, and what you must do if you want to call yourself an ally, is examine your privilege as thoroughly as possible, and commit to never abusing it. this is probably impossible since you have been socialized literally from birth to abuse it in a variety of quiet, petty, everyday ways, but the decision to actively oppose patriarchy must begin there

the cool thing about opposing patriarchy is that it’s not nearly as depressing as opposing capitalism can sometimes be, because educating and enlightening people actually has an immediate effect. a social structure like patriarchy exists only because of the largely unconscious cooperation of the people who comprise that structure, and every single act of education and enlightenment chips away at it by elevating that unconscious cooperation to a conscious level. (this is also why a lot of people who were politicized by engaging with feminism are perennially naive liberals: they assume that undermining capitalism can work in the same way)

patriarchy has deeply co-opted athletics but athletics resists this co-optation due to its inherent...

Mon, 25 Jul 2011 13:31:00 -0400

patriarchy has deeply co-opted athletics but athletics resists this co-optation due to its inherent nature

in an individualistic society such as patriarchy encourages, men (and women) are taught to judge their own value by engaging in competition with others. men in particular are taught that the manliest, and therefore the best, venue for this is athletic competition. women who are allowed to develop athletic ability and who wish to overcome their patriarchal role often internalize these values as well: very few things feel better than beating boys at their game

patriarchy also teaches athletes to value individualistic attributes most highly, such as strength, toughness, endurance, aggression, and tenacity. but a set of interrelated virtues which we collectively label ‘teamwork’ are actually the attributes which are most necessary for success in any team sport, encompassing mostly ‘feminine’ values (i.e. values which patriarchal society does not respect) such as cooperation, mutual aid, selflessness, solidarity, cohesiveness, & so on & so on *wipes nose*

perhaps seemingly paradoxically, the antidote to this poisonous emphasis of individualism and deemphasis of collectivism is for leagues to be “highly competitive,” meaning that the athletes take the leagues very seriously and put a high priority on team success. it’s easy to make a league competitive: well-organized and and well-funded leagues encourage athletes to take them seriously. in a so-called competitive league, as opposed to a casual one, athletes simply cannot afford to ignore the paramount importance of teamwork if they are to remain successful

therefore, providing opportunities for well-organized and highly-competitive team sports for men and women at a young age is critical to undermining a social focus on individualism. a league must be well-organized and competitive enough to naturally demand that athletes focus on teamwork and its associated ‘feminine’ virtues as the primary attribute necessary for success. one of the greatest social benefits of team sports is its ability to force athletes to confront patriarchal ideas about individualism vs. collectivism

hooray science chat. specifically, degenerate matter chati hope everyone remembers the ideal gas law...

Sat, 16 Jul 2011 04:22:00 -0400

hooray science chat. specifically, degenerate matter chat

i hope everyone remembers the ideal gas law PV=nRT or PV=NkT? the point of that was that temperature, volume, and pressure are related. compress a gas into a smaller volume and it gets hotter. heat a gas while keeping it confined at a constant volume and the pressure will skyrocket. and so on and so on *wipes nose* the ideal gas law is a hilarious oversimplification because no gases are ideal but the basic principle is what matters. and this relationship between temperate volume & pressure is what i’m gonna call thermokinetic pressure because i used the word on a final exam talking about this stuff once, afraid i was making it up. i got full credit for the essay and the only comment the professor wrote was to put an exclamation point after the word the first time i used it (essay finals in upper-division science classes own so hard)

anyway degenerate matter is matter with such a literally astronomically high density that thermokinetic pressure becomes irrelevant. instead its pressure depends on what’s called the degeneracy effect, which under most conditions is so small you can just ignore it. remember the uncertainty principle? the better you know a particle’s position the more uncertain its momentum is, and vice versa? well this isn’t just a measurement effect like a lot of people think; it’s an actual physical law that describes how particles behave whether you’re looking or not. and in degenerate matter the particles are so densely packed that the uncertainty of their position is fucking small because they’re so close together there’s just nowhere else for them to be. that means the uncertanity of their momentum is correspondingly fucking immense. and that means their average velocities are also fucking immense (we’re talking relativistic orders of magnitude). an immense uncertainty in velocity means there’s a wide range of possible velocities, and if you divide that wide range over a lot of particles you get a tremendously high average particle velocity (temperature!). and this means it takes a fucking immense force to keep those particles confined. and that force is degeneracy pressure! hooray

okay so now that we’ve got all that, let’s think about a white dwarf star. it’s the collapsed core of a burned-out normal star (no not a supernova that’s something else). it’s no longer powered by fusion and will gradually cool over a drastically long time. it just shines because it’s so hot and dense. we’re thinking about this star because it’s made of degenerate matter. specifically, what’s called electron-degenerate matter, because it’s supported against further gravitational collapse only by electron degeneracy pressure. the only thing keeping the atoms apart is that their electrons are close enough to each other that they’re trying to occupy the same orbitals, which the exclusion principle prevents

and the real fun begins if you add mass to that star. once its mass passes the chandrasekhar limit (1.44 times the mass of the sun) the force of gravity trying to compress it becomes strong enough to overcome the exclusion principle and shred the atoms. (what actually happens is that all the electrons and protons get crushed together to form extra neutrons, in addition to the neutrons that were already there.) and the star collapses further* until the degenerate matter is now just a bunch of neutrons packed together just like in the nucleus of a single colossal fucking atom. so weird. and now you’ve got a neutron star, made up of neutron-degenerate matter supported against gravitational collapse by neutron degeneracy pressure

but the fun still doesn’t have to stop! although the physics get seriously sketchy at this point because the conditions are so extreme that you start bumping up against the edges of the Standard Model everywhere, so this stuff is all hard or impossible to actually model. but if you keep adding mass, basically the same thing happens again, except gravity shreds the neutrons into quarks, the star collapses even further, and you’ve got a quark star made of quark-degenerate matter and supported against gravitational collapse by quark degeneracy pressure. the quarks are all packed together just like in a single colossal fucking neutron. super weird

(preons probably aren’t real, but if they are, this can happen one more time. add more mass to the quark star so that gravitational pressure shreds the quarks into preons and you get a preon star made of preon-degenerate matter and supported against gravitational collapse by preon degeneracy pressure, and the preons are all packed together like in a single colossal fucking quark. weird as fuck but, again, probably not real)

but then you’re at the end of the line. if you add enough mass to overcome quark degeneracy pressure, nothing is left to overcome the gravitational pressure trying to collapse the star ever inward (gravity always wins, as early radiohead fans know), and at this point the universe decides you’re being a dick and gives you the finger. the star collapses into a singularity, a black hole, and you can’t even interact with the matter any more except by observing the truly obscene things its mass does to space, or by observing the hawking radiation from its evaporation (assuming it’s rotating, and it’s gonna be rotating like a motherfucker unless you somehow wizarded up a non-rotating white dwarf star to start off with)

* (for correctness: if you add mass to a stable white dwarf irl, by accretion from a companion star or something, you don’t actually get a neutron star. instead you get a type Ia supernova as soon as its mass hits the chandrasekhar limit and it starts to collapse. this is because as it collapses, its entire core will exceed the CNO-cycle fusion ignition temperature all at once before the pressure gets high enough to reach a neutron-degenerate state, and the energy from all that sudden CNO fusion will cause the star to “become gravitationally unbound” which is a really dull astronomy way of saying it blows the fuck apart at relativistic velocities i mean holy goddamn christ. the only way to get past the electron-degenerate stage irl is if the object is collapsing with enough momentum to overwhelm the sudden thermokinetic pressure exerted by CNO ignition, snuffing it out as the core’s atoms cease to exist as separate entities. this can only happen at the center of a type II core-collapse supernova, which is the only way you can get the more highly degenerate objects like neutron stars, quark stars, and black holes)

Black holes also have an electric charge, I believe.

yeah all these degenerate objects tend to be seriously fucking charged, which persists after they collapse into a singularity, so the black hole still has a magnetic field and you can still interact with the matter in there that way. actually one of the wicked cool things about degenerate-matter stars is that they have such strong magnetic fields that you get all kinds of incredibly bizarre magnetic effects going on even at a subatomic level, like atomic orbitals getting warped into weird shapes and shit. (they have a layer of normal, non-degenerate, atomic matter at the surface; it only degenerates as you go deeper) that’s also what causes the directionality of their radiation, producing the pulsar effect

but fuck if pharma will ever do the basic research that they really, really really need to get...

Thu, 14 Jul 2011 23:48:00 -0400

but fuck if pharma will ever do the basic research that they really, really really need to get anything done because they’re super short-sighted. i mean, ten years ago nobody thought about cancer immunotherapy, now bristol-meyers squibb is selling Ipilimumab for 120k for a treatment. christ.

pharma has the same problem as every other industry that relies on significant long-term investments to keep profits high: idiot shareholders and fund managers who shuffle around their portfolios every few months and who don’t give a shit where the company is in ten years

increase long-view basic research and the quarterlies look worse, everyone dumps the stock and tanks its price, execs who all hold tons of stock lose money, and the board fires them. slash R&D and the few remaining buy-and-hold investors will complain but the short-timers love it and want back on board because the quarterlies suddenly look great, so the share price soars, and stockholding execs make money and look like geniuses

inherent contradictions of late capitalism etc etc

i’ve heard that ministers & etc will rouse their congregations to go vote for specific...

Mon, 11 Jul 2011 20:40:00 -0400

i’ve heard that ministers & etc will rouse their congregations to go vote for specific people, is this a normal sort of thing in evangelical congregations & if yes would the ministers back romney?

they absolutely do that shit even though it’s completely illegal (churches can technically lose their tax-exempt status for electioneering but i’m not aware of a single instance in which it’s been pulled off) so the wiser ones tiptoe around it by refusing to come right out and say that jesus wants you to vote for huckabee although the message can be loud and clear without containing a specific endorsement. and yes it’s very much the norm in evangelical congregations. when romney wins the nomination i expect the trend will be more of a conspicuous silence from the pulpit or a focus on downballot anti-choice or anti-lgbt initiatives

the actual open candidate & issue advocacy all happens outside of the sermon on sunday morning. ministers apply pressure from the pulpit which is very clear if you speak the language but which, if they have reason to fear scrutiny, is carefully tailored to not be legally actionable. honestly though sometimes they just don’t give a fuck because nothing’s happened to any of them yet so they feel more and more that they have nothing to fear

with that said, don’t overestimate the authoritarianism of these churches. there’s still a streak of antiauthoritariansim in protestants, and most evangelicals don’t need their ministers to tell them who to vote for. they’ve already internalized a certain worldview and value system which they’re perfectly capable of guiding their decision by, even in the absence of nudging from their church

evangelical churches have dozens and, in megachurches, literally hundreds of small groups usually oriented around gender and status like widowed, widowers, college women, men’s reading circle, fatherhood, etc etc etc. these groups meet regularly, tend to be pretty tightly knit, and basically become activist cells when there’s an issue that stirs the hive. evangelicals are profoundly well-organized compared even to liberals, to say nothing of what passes for the left in the US

so they’d volunteer and donate for bachmann in droves but definitely not for romney. they’ll still turn out in november to vote on the anti-choice and anti-lgbt stuff that’s highly likely to be downballot in states where a lot of them live. a few will skip over romney to spite the GOP, a few will enthusiastically vote for ron paul or some constitution party kook, most will just tap romney’s name and murmur ‘lord forgive us’

most mainline protestants don’t give a shit about catholicism any more. they’re pretty...

Mon, 11 Jul 2011 20:31:04 -0400

most mainline protestants don’t give a shit about catholicism any more. they’re pretty ecumenical and catholic hate has been literally dying off since the most rabid haters always tended to be really fucking old. several mainline protestant denominations’ leaderships have been working at what they call reconciliation, which basically just means patching up relations with the vatican, usually by giving ground on old symbolic points of contention none of them really care about any more. mainliners under 40 or so tend to view catholic-hating with the same sense of revulsion as racial bigotry

the really virulent catholic hate is relegated to evangelicalism and even there it’s pretty marginalized. you really only see that old-time papist-hatin’ in splinter congregations that have been cut loose from one of the major evangelical denominations on account of being too fucking crazy even for them, or in ‘nondenominational’ fundamentalist congregations which often are havens for all kinds of lunacy

interestingly enough, mainline protestants tend to get weirded out by mormonism more than fundamentalists, probably because the fundamentalists recognize they have common cause with mormons on a lot of social issues and already view everyone else as outsiders anyway, while the mainliners tend to be more socially liberal so they have no common ground with the LDS on anything

but don’t misread me, evangelicals are all plenty suspicious of mormons and won’t lift a finger for romney except to touch his name on the screen on election day. once it becomes clear that he’s going to steamroll everyone else in the primary, you can expect to see a scramble to get some really fucking disgusting anti-choice and lgbt oppression initiatives on the november ballots in states with lots of evangelicals to get them to turn out. they’ll hold their noses and tap romney’s name if they’re already at the polls to fight the culture war, but they won’t turn out for him alone

you can be “raised” nominally pentecostal but go to public school and a state...

Sun, 10 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0400

you can be “raised” nominally pentecostal but go to public school and a state university, marry a nice lutheran (LCMS not ELCA and you wouldn’t even need to ask), work as an insurance adjuster, live in a suburban mcmansion, and send your one or two kids to its evangelical-monoculture public schools. and despite the fact that you’re nominally as fundamentalist as it gets, vote straight-ticket republican, and go to church twice a week where you profess all the requisite dogma with all the appropriate devotion, the hard-core wing of your own church sees you as the enemy within the gates and the hellfire and brimstone sermons against “backsliders” are directed squarely at you

because the typical member of that hard-core wing was homeschooled, went to a pentecostal university and married another ultra-orthodox person they met there, works as an “abstinence advocate” for a pentecostal nonprofit, bought a smaller house because it was in an intentional suburban micro-enclave, gathers signatures to get constitution party candidates on ballots, and homeschools their three or four or seven kids, or sends them to a fundamentalist-controlled private school. they exist entirely inside the bubble. everything outside it is corrupt, and everything near its edges is in real danger of becoming so

southern baptists and pentecostals aren’t really different in that respect. smaller denominations like the church of christ, the nazarenes, and the missouri synod lutherans are sometimes even more insular because the persection complex is stronger, and anecdotally members of fundamentalist splinter congregations within more mainline denominations are probably the most paranoid and insular of all because they’re even in conflict with their own churches’ larger administrative bodies

ultimately, trainspotting denominational differences between fundamentalist evangelicals is a fine hobby but not very useful: they’re extremely monolithic at the present moment

what kinds of methods and metaphors and whatever do you guys use to talk about The True Nature of...

Tue, 05 Jul 2011 18:54:00 -0400

what kinds of methods and metaphors and whatever do you guys use to talk about The True Nature of Capitalism?

it all depends on the person, imo if you really know and understand them, you’ll intuitively understand what they’ll respond to. but you can’t just deliberately sit them down and convert them to the one true faith of marxism-leninism, you can’t treat it as a sales pitch, you can’t steer conversations where you want them to go. at first talking to your friends about The True Nature of Capitalism is more about not being afraid to embody your ideology in the course of your everyday companionable interactions with them

if you aren’t a dumbass soon they will see you as the Friend Who Understands These Things and will come to you when they’re frustrated or confused or angry about some sociopolitical Thing or another and want to talk about it. this is validating but it is not your golden opportunity to harangue them at length so relax and just continue treating them as, you know, a friend who wanted to talk about a Thing

keep up with dumb current-events crap because people who want to feel politically engaged do, and you need to be able to offer an educating and enlightening perspective when some news thing comes up in conversation and everyone wants to know their Radical Friend’s opinion. you blow an opportunity if you just shrug and say “sounds irrelevant but idk since i only read maoist third worldist tumblrs” even though most of the time it actually is irrelevant

yes, the primacy of the dogma of biblical literalism is absolutely crucial, it’s the defining...

Tue, 05 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0400

yes, the primacy of the dogma of biblical literalism is absolutely crucial, it’s the defining characteristic of fundamentalism and even evangelicals who reject the label ‘fundamentalist,’ whether because it’s seen as tainted by extremism or because of doctrinal differences, are sympathetic to what they perceive as the principled purity of the fundamentalist outlook. sola scriptura is very much still the watchword in american protestantism

however biblical literalism is pretty meaningless if you actually consider what the christian bible is: a collection of documents that frequently contradict one another and which often contradict themselves since they were assembled from earlier documents. literalism does you no good with a self-contradictory text so the various evangelical sects are defined by how they resolve these conflicts

what’s interesting is that there is so much agreement among these sects as to what the bible actually says. even though the primary doctrine of fundamentalism is the primacy of a literal reading of scripture without any need for textual criticism or deep reflecton, hermeneutical exegesis is nonetheless readily brought into play to resolve or paper over apparent contradictions because a believer absolutely must be able to maintain the notion of biblical self-consistency. the whole thing hangs on that principle

i could cite book chapter and verse of some well known conflicts and give tedious examples of how virtually all evangelical sects explain them away in virtually the same way but i expect it would just bore people, so just pretend i did that and hey presto they all chose the same verse to interpret ‘literally’ without resort to hermeneutics at all, while invoking identical exegesis to gloss over the apparent inconsistency of the other verse, when a more objective critical reading reveals there isn’t any obvious reason to prefer one or the other at all

so yes the primacy of a literal interpretation of biblical scripture is important but there’s much more going on under the surface, because virtually all evangelical sects choose to take the same readings of virtually all conflicting passages and choose to explain away those apparent contradictions in virtually the same way, giving them a tremendousamount of shared dogma! this is probably not at all obvious to a casual outside observer

and the emphasis on personal experience is entirely rhetorical, it’s only seen as meaningful when it conforms to dogma. it’s a vestigial remnant from a long time ago when evangelicals needed a reason to distance themselves from mainliners and when all american protestants were viciously, rabidly, violently anticatholic. no one cares any more and doctrinal purity is what validates personal experience: only very specific and well-defined personal experiences of the divine are acceptable

apparent differences in praxis are based on minor variant readings of isolated passages that are really insignificant compared to the rest of their shared dogma; they’re artifacts of schisms which seemed drastically important decades or centuries ago but which are very much minimized today in the face of the perceived threat of secular (non-evangelical) society. evangelical communities can be astonishingly tolerant when it comes to interdenominational differences because they correctly recognize the need for unity in the face of the existential threat that secular society represents, so it is imo absolutely correct to conceive of american evangelicalism as effectively a monolithic bloc

as for the question of how much of this was created by the efforts of the GOP to draw evangelicals into politics, i don’t know. until the mid-70s the prevailing view was that politics, and especially electoral politics, was fundamentally corrupt and that evangelical churches should therefore remain completely disengaged from it. older evangelicals who always counseled against political involvement are being vindicated now, as evangelicals saw bush as ‘their’ president and felt utterly betrayed by the GOP’s failure to significantly advance any of their key issues — overturning roe v. wade paramount among them

see, to understand evangelical involvement in politics, you have to understand just how crazy abortion makes them. they really do view it as literal infanticide, they really do believe fetal life is equivalent to infant life, they are raised with this view and, unless they break out of the bubble (rare), they will never change their minds because it is ingrained and repeated essentially from birth. they really do believe women’s health care providers are constantly carrying out the literal moral equivalent of the holocaust, and since they are fantastically well-organized compared to the left, there are only two things keeping them from engaging in serious armed rebellion about it

one is a problem they share with revolutionary leftists: the militarized police state. the more radical among them share the same paranoia about infiltration and the same cynicism about civil liberties that the more radical leftists do, rightfully so because right-wing groups are the ones who, when they go bonkers enough, actually stockpile weapons and blow shit up (ruby ridge, waco, various women’s health providers, oklahoma city, etc etc) so they tend to be more closely watched

the other mollifying factor is the existence of a piece of dogma claiming a nation’s leaders are somehow endorsed by god and that one rebels against god when one rebels against one’s nation. without boring you to tears with tedious chapter and verse analysis, take my word for it: the ‘literal interpretation’ justifying that dogma is flimsier than most, the more radical among them already don’t buy it, and if they’re ever sufficiently motivated, it won’t take long to deemphasize and forget it

most evangelicals, especially those over 35 or so, are still single-issue abortion voters and place secondary importance on the bundling of ‘social issues’ like lbgt rights, which is understandable from their perspective. it’s very similar to how leftists don’t have much enthusiasm about repealing DADT as long as wars of imperialism and the exploitation of the third world continue. similarly evangelicals didn’t get all that excited about DOMA because abortion is still legal and besides, same-sex marriage was already illegal pretty much everywhere. they don’t really even care that much about same-sex marriage, their only serious fear is that their churches will be ordered by the state to perform or acknowledge those marriages. it’s paranoia but it makes sense in the context of their self-conception and narrative

anyway, bush’s appointment of alito shifted the court from voting 5-4 in stenberg v. carhartt (an overturn of a kansas ban on intact dilation & extraction) in 2000 to voting 5-4 in gonzales v. carhartt (upholding a nationwide ban on the same “partial birth abortion” procedure). this was seen, quite correctly imo, as a clear indication that the court could overturn roe entirely if only the GOP, then in control of both houses, would just pass a ban (which would then immediately be challenged, thrown to the court, and upheld 5-4). but the republicans sat on their hands because they do not actually give a shit about overturning roe: it’s just useful rhetoric to keep evangelicals politically engaged, and the democrats play along because it’s useful rhetoric to keep feminists politically engaged. a lot of evangelicals saw through this and are now extremely disillusioned with the republican party even though for a generation it was unquestionably the party of jesus

i don’t know how much of the near-lockstep unity of the evangelical community’s dogma was created by roe and how much of it was intensified and exploited by the republicans. i know that the ever-increasing pervasiveness of mass media has historically been a big concern because it made it ever harder to stay isolated from the perceived corruption of secular society (although as capital realized in the late 80s and early 90s that there was an immense amount of money to be made off these people, it’s set about employing them to create an entire parallel media stream with cable networks, publishing houses, production studios, you name it.)

i also know that the changes of the 60s seriously freaked evangelicals out and a big, big part of the narrative is that they see themselves as the last bastion of sanity in a country that started going crazy in the 60s, and i’m certain that narrative was in place long before roe was decided

so it’s probably a confluence of all these things. rhizomes etc. and the decision about what dogma to embrace is made pretty organically without any need for centralized leadership because the decisions are entirely reactionary. they respond to what they see as the encroachment of secular society because, even though their sects are growing while others are losing adherents, they still correctly see secularism as an existential threat to their faith and indeed to their entire way of life. (and now they have a symbiosis with a little slice of capital, creating that parallel media stream for them)

i am curious how you think that ground work will be laid? do you think that it’s enough for...

Sun, 03 Jul 2011 23:09:00 -0400

i am curious how you think that ground work will be laid? do you think that it’s enough for us to sit back, talk politically, and wait for the circumstances to change? capitalism may collapse within our lifetimes but that also means within our lifetimes we have to be agitating and pushing and prodding… well before the shit hits the fan.

yeah the narrative that social change just springs fully armored from zeus’s forehead is just a big fat lie. the montgomery bus boycotts didn’t happen because rosa parks’ feet hurt. she was an activist who had attended a workshop about resistance, a workshop which itself required the existence of a movement to organize and hold it, and so on. the whole thing required momentum. the question is, how do we get ourselves to that movement-building stage where we have some momentum

my current perspective is that we’re nowhere near it. maybe this is a reflection of the conservatism of the region i’m currently in, but right now openly identifying as a marxist means nobody is willing to talk to you about politics because you’re nuts. that’s not an environment in which you can agitate successfully

that’s part of the reason i suggest being involved in harm-reduction activism wherever you can: it exposes you to people who might be questioning the system’s contradictions and who are open to radical rejection of captalism and two-party politics. that and the sort of person-to-person education i referred to are what i mean when i say ‘laying groundwork’

maybe i should stop using the term ‘collapse’ because even though it’s well-grounded in theory people seem to interpret it as ‘okay just sit around and wait for the collapse’ and that’s not what i mean at all. what i mean is that economic crisis will make it increasingly clear that liberal capitalism is failing. our job is to be there to educate people as they become disillusioned with it. currently that means person-to-person work because there are few alternatives

as crisis deepens, more people will be looking for answers, and the capacity of those person-to-person networks will be overwhelmed until you feel like you’re spending all your time talking to people about marx irl. then it’s time to look at more traditional institutional organizing, and by that time it’s likely you’ll have enough comrades to make this easy and natural

is this entirely satisfactory?

maybe not, but i’m open to suggestions; it’s just what i’m doing because i literally don’t know what else to do

is it sufficient to just sit around and talk to your two leftist friends about marxisms while you wait for capitalism to collapse and for the proletariat to rise up and seize power?

of course not and fuck you if you think it is

it’s very concerning to me that for all the discussion on the awfulness of capitalism etc,...

Sun, 03 Jul 2011 22:36:00 -0400

it’s very concerning to me that for all the discussion on the awfulness of capitalism etc, there is little to no discussion on ways to move forward. i want to know why that is! and if you have any ideas on how to move forward (or even why moving forward is surely useless??)

well imo all we can meaningfully currently do is educate people in our personal irl social networks, while engaging in harm-reduction-oriented activism through whatever existing groups are available

i think it’s a mistake to identify too strongly with any particular leftist party or splinter group or read too narrowly because the left is fragmented badly enough as it is. right now imo it’s enough to read theory broadly and to rigorously guard against allowing yourself to sectarianize; “anticapitalist/antifascist” is plenty specific

as for what harm-reduction actions to get involved in, i think it’s best to be guided by your personal values and priorities because that’s naturally where you’ll be most effective; it will also expose you to a lot of well meaning liberals who might be looking for answers to some of its inherent contradictions

i think our generation represents a demographic bubble that’s pretty important; for the first time in a long time a lot of people will have been utterly failed by the system and will be looking for answers in ever-greater numbers, and it’s our job to be sure that “look left” is on the table for them. and at the present moment i think the most effective way to do that is to cultivate genuine friendships in which people feel comfortable discussing society and politics with you, and i’m honestly not sure how organizing in the traditional sense will help with that because the political is ultimately personal and organizations are ultimately impersonal, especially at this point where the decision to reject liberal capitalism and the two-party system is still so intensely personal

when major economic crisis does arrive and fascism is obviously (obviously to us, it will strenuously reject the label) beginning to organize itself to replace liberalism, that imo will be the time to mobilize a large widespread formal organizing effort to oppose it. hopefully by that time enough of us will have done enough ground work on a person-to-person level that a critical mass of people will see american fascism for what it is and will be willing to oppose it by any means necessary

maybe in the near future people will be radicalizing in large enough numbers that a person-to-person approach is unnecessary and inefficient but in the meantime i’m not sure it’s the best way to proceed. of course that’s far from a final conclusion, the situation will change with time

yeah women being super uncomfortable with their bodies seems common and sucks a lot and i have...

Sun, 03 Jul 2011 14:30:00 -0400

yeah women being super uncomfortable with their bodies seems common and sucks a lot and i have frankly no idea how to tackle it. because it would obviously be hilariously horrible if i were like “HEY! GET COMFORTABLE YOU’RE FINE BABE” but at the same time all the slow understanding and gentle prodding in the world still seems hell of manipulative and frankly ineffective

it is very cool of you to realize there is not a video game called The Self-Image of a Woman where if you, the protagonist, pick the Right Choice in every conversation and collect 100% of the secret collectibles and learn the gimmicky tricks to beat the extra challenge bosses Shame and Patriarchy then you can get the Very Best Ending where she’s like “thank you cloud now i am perfectly comfortable with my body and it’s all because of you *smooch, fade to black*” and it puts a gold medal on your account so everyone else knows how enlightened you are

because i feel that is the way a lot of men treat pretty much every aspect of a relationship and not just physical self-concept stuff. i know when men fish for advice sometimes i get the distinct impression they think i’m gamefaqs

anyway i’m just venting

if you like something about your girlfriend’s body, but she says something about how she hates it or wishes it was different, or if she has just finished extemporizing at considerable length about how and why her relationship with that aspect of her body is primarily characterized by a complex dialectic with various patriarchal systems of control, and she is now looking at you like it is your turn to say something, your thesis should be more along the lines of “well i like it” while avoiding something that risks accidentally sounding like “well you shouldn’t feel that way about it”

gen-Y people have a much complex relationship with the boomers than just hatred the most common...

Sun, 03 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0400

gen-Y people have a much complex relationship with the boomers than just hatred

the most common understanding is that the boomers, because of the simple fact of their numbers, had a unique historical opportunity to make revolutionary change — even non-revolutionaries concede that and see it as an opportunity, which is interesting in itself — and while they made progress on human rights issues and eventually “stopped the war” (lol) their movement fell apart and their moment passed. that understanding is all pretty widely shared i think. but where gen-Ys differ is in understanding what happened to the youth movements of the 60s

what actually happened is they were co-opted by the establishment and every youth movement since then has been co-opted and subverted with increasing efficiency until the 90s when capital finally perfected the art and started manufacturing its own youth countercultures (this is why grunge is interesting imo because it marks the point where the circuit closed) but capital would prefer we thought the boomers were fundamentally amoral people who grew bored with social justice and decided to just get fukken paid bro

either way we probably tend to overromanticize the 60s counterculture as a moment when genuinely revolutionary change was possible, while simultaneously feeling frustrated and betrayed by the ultimate outcome, and that tends to get expressed most often as disgust with boomers

i think the youth movements of the 60s made incredible accomplishments and took full advantage of the moment they had. that’s exactly why capital had to learn to subvert and co-opt them, and has had to do the same with every youth counterculture since: they were a genuine threat. the 60s counterculture never had a chance at revolution but its overwheming successes in harm reduction are still difficult for me to grasp

my cynicism about stopping the war reflects my view that it would have been impossible to stop if the establishment hadn’t been motivated by other factors including but not limited to domestic unrest, not that i deny the power and influence such unrest had. so no, i don’t think the 60s youth movements singlehandedly stopped the war (the position i was scoffing at) but i do think they had a part in it

of course any man who approaches feminism from the position of “how can I help the downtrodden...

Sat, 02 Jul 2011 20:30:00 -0400

of course any man who approaches feminism from the position of “how can I help the downtrodden male from a feminist perspective today?” is obviously Not Getting It

but most if not all of the privilege men are afforded isn’t due to their own actions, it’s due to the existence of bias in their favor on a societal level. a man who approaches feminism from the position of “how can i personally lose all my privilege” is just as misguided because he ignores that it is impossible for him to lose all his privilege. he ignores that his privilege is not due to any action or inaction on his own part, but is provided by a much larger societal institution

imo an effective male feminist/ally recognizes that his privilege is an unalterable fact of his existence, and instead of denying it he uses it to aid women feminists in their struggle against their common enemy: the vast and interlocking set of societal conventions we label as patriarchy

obviously privilege benefits individual men and is a net benefit to groups of men and to men as a...

Sat, 02 Jul 2011 16:30:00 -0400

obviously privilege benefits individual men and is a net benefit to groups of men and to men as a whole; that’s why we use the words privilege and patriarchy. but the social process of generating that privilege also harms individual men, groups of men, and men as a whole. without getting into privilege/oppression olympics i think it’s certainly possible for individual men to be harmed more by the process than they benefit from the privilege it generates

and patriarchy isn’t without some trivial and isolated benefits for women, they’re just far overshadowed by the fact that privilege is necessarily zero-sum and they’re on the wrong side of its equation. antifeminist (men’s rights, etc) arguments almost always consist entirely of citing those few trivial benefits to women and the ways which patriarchy harms men, while ignoring everything else

those are all things i agree with, i just like to imagine there’s an elegant, insightful way to wrap all these things together such that the distinction between the narrow individual and broad social perspectives are resolved, the privileges and oppressions relative to each gender and explained by the same principle and the way the system perpetuates itself can be understood concretely and without resorting to pithy generalisms.

yeah idk it seems to me that patriarchy is such a complex rhizomatic entity that i’m not sure i hold out much hope for a really elegant theory. i mean, i understand why people get irritated when you even use the word ‘patriarchy’ because if they don’t know shit about feminism, the context still makes it clear that there is a really huge Thing being represented by that word, which makes them despair of being able to apprehend the conversation let alone participate in it or learn something from it

then again i am not nearly so well-read as i ought to be and it’s possible my view of it as complex and difficult to theorize is just a reflection of my own poor and incomplete understanding of it. you always think something you don’t understand is more complex than it really is, even if understanding it ultimately gives you a better appreciation for its complexity. with stuff like patriarchy sometimes it’s hard to tell which side of that you’re on