I explained something for a friend in a simple way, and I think it's worth paraphrasing again here.
You cannot create a system that constrains itself. Any constraint on a system must be external to the system, or that constraint can be ignored or removed. That's just how systems work. Every constitution for every country claims to do this impossible thing, a thing proven is impossible almost 100 years ago now. Gödel's loophole has been known to exist since 1947.
Every constitution in the world, every "separation of powers" and set of "checks and balances," attempts to do something which is categorically impossible. Every government is always, at best, a few steps away from authoritarianism. From this, we would then expect that governments trand towards authoritarianism. Which, of course, is what we see historically.
Constraints on power are a formality, because no real controls can possibly exist. So then democratic processes become sort of collective classifiers that try to select only people who won't plunge the country into a dictatorship. Again, because this claim of restrictions on powers is a lie (willful or ignorant, a lie reguardless) that classifier has to be correct 100% of the time (even assuming a best case scenario). That's statistically unlikely.
So as long as you have a system of concentrated power, you will have the worst people attracted to it, and you will inevitably have that power fall into the hands of one of the worst possible person.
Fortunately, there is an alternative. The alternative is to not centralize power. In the security world we try to design systems that assume compromise and minimize impact, rather than just assuming that we will be right 100% of the time. If you build systems that maximially distribute power, then you minimize the impact of one horrible person.
Now, I didn't mention this because we're both already under enough stress, but...
Almost 90% of the nuclear weapons deployed around the world are in the hands of ghoulish dictators. Only two of the countries with nuclear weapons not straight up authoritarian, but they're not far off. We're one crashout away from steralizing the surface of the Earth with nuclear hellfire. Maybe countries shouldn't exist, and definitely multiple thousands of nuclear weapons shouldn't exist and shouldn't all be wired together to launch as soon as one of these assholes goes a bit too far sideways.
I urge everyone to re-read and contemplate Willem Van Spronsen’s Final Statement with the context of Kilmar Abrego Garcia rendition to a concentration camp where people are being starved to death, the kidnaping and disappearance of anti-genocide activists, the detention of US born citizens, and the threat to expand El Salvador's concentration camp program to allow for the rendition and detention of thousands of American citizens.
Read it now, before anyone who dares to talk about it gets disappeared to a Central American death camp.
https://itsgoingdown.org/on-williem-van-spronsen/
#USPol
I know we're all really anxious right now. There are ways to deal with that anxiety outside of the doom scrolling that you're probably doing right now... Or whatever other avoidant behavior you're probably also engaging in.
We naturally try to avoid bad feelings, like fear and anxiety. We may spiral on what-if scenarios that let us imagine all sorts of horrible things without ever facing them.
But there are practices that suggest that the best way. Instead of trying to avoid the anxiety created by fear, we can directly face the thing we fear the most. Buddhists have a meditation on death. This is referenced in The Book of the Five Rings, which is itself referenced in the film Ghost Dog... Which... If you do need a distraction, is a really good movie.
This can be adapted to deal with any anxiety. Choose the thing that makes you most afraid. Instead of figuring out how to avoid it, or imagining yourself being saved from it, imagine it has already happened. What happens next? Is there something else scary that could happen? Imagine that happening. Keep going until there's nothing left to be afraid of.
In the end, there is death. There is the heat death of the universe. There is void, and there is nothing to fear in that void. Rather, there is beauty in the fact that we ever got to experice anything at all. In this instant, you are safe. In this instant, you have everything you need. Nothing that happens next can take away this instant from you.
So let's try it, for the anxiety many Americans are feeling...
Hope feels crazy right now, in the face of everything. But that frenetic energy, resisting against impossible odds, is exactly the thing we need.
Hegemony is about controlling what is normal and sounds sane. It's about controlling what is possible. It's about making you feel crazy for not fitting in. Ultimately it's about making everyone feel uncomfortable about themselves, and making everyone feel alone in that discomfort.
So there are two questions we should all be asking ourselves and eachother:
1) What kind of world do I want to exist?
2) What is the smallest achievable step I could take towards that?
As it turns out, humans are way smarter in groups than alone, so this is a group activity. In the lead up to the French Revolution, agitators used to put together dinners with wine. When everyone was a little buzzed, they would direct the conversation towards the monarchy. It turns out that people living under authoritarianism often feel alone in their discomfort (but in reality, rarely are).
So why not have a hope party? Get your friends together, take a break from the horror that is and talk for a bit about what could be. Humans have done really amazing things throughout history (regardless of the small group of people who want you to forget that).
Tell stories, think about what's possible, and then challenge and support eachother to take steps towards that vision.
Edit: make it a #SolarPunk themed party for extra credit. ;)
When I say things like "it's up to us" and "no one will save us," I don't mean it in any kind of abstract way. We have to disrupt hundreds of years of entrenched power in order to keep billions of people from dying. That means all of us. That means you.
You are important. The things you do are important. We have all been sold a version of history where one great person (usually a man) does something, and it changes the world for everyone. That story is a lie. It may even be the opposite of the truth.
Change comes from social networks, by lots of people working together (often without knowing it), whose ideas are often captured and voiced by a few individuals. History recognizes those individuals as the cause of social change, rather than a late stage effect.
What you say and do today will shape the world we live in tomorrow. What do you want that to look like?
One thing you can do to achieve that is just to ask this question with a couple of your friends and talk it out. Every conversation you have about what could be brings it closer to actually being.
I explained something for a friend in a simple way, and I think it's worth paraphrasing again here.
You cannot create a system that constrains itself. Any constraint on a system must be external to the system, or that constraint can be ignored or removed. That's just how systems work. Every constitution for every country claims to do this impossible thing, a thing proven is impossible almost 100 years ago now. Gödel's loophole has been known to exist since 1947.
Every constitution in the world, every "separation of powers" and set of "checks and balances," attempts to do something which is categorically impossible. Every government is always, at best, a few steps away from authoritarianism. From this, we would then expect that governments trand towards authoritarianism. Which, of course, is what we see historically.
Constraints on power are a formality, because no real controls can possibly exist. So then democratic processes become sort of collective classifiers that try to select only people who won't plunge the country into a dictatorship. Again, because this claim of restrictions on powers is a lie (willful or ignorant, a lie reguardless) that classifier has to be correct 100% of the time (even assuming a best case scenario). That's statistically unlikely.
So as long as you have a system of concentrated power, you will have the worst people attracted to it, and you will inevitably have that power fall into the hands of one of the worst possible person.
Fortunately, there is an alternative. The alternative is to not centralize power. In the security world we try to design systems that assume compromise and minimize impact, rather than just assuming that we will be right 100% of the time. If you build systems that maximially distribute power, then you minimize the impact of one horrible person.
Now, I didn't mention this because we're both already under enough stress, but...
Almost 90% of the nuclear weapons deployed around the world are in the hands of ghoulish dictators. Only two of the countries with nuclear weapons not straight up authoritarian, but they're not far off. We're one crashout away from steralizing the surface of the Earth with nuclear hellfire. Maybe countries shouldn't exist, and definitely multiple thousands of nuclear weapons shouldn't exist and shouldn't all be wired together to launch as soon as one of these assholes goes a bit too far sideways.
#FuckCars as usual. Like Rage Against the Machine songs, social critiques should become less relevant not more relevant over time. This one from 1973 is far more relevant now than ever.
Cars are fundamentally reactionary, both in their purpose and in their utility to the dominant class.
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2018-08-13/the-social-ideology-of-the-motorcar/
The only remaining survival strategy of a dying system is to keep us so transfixed by the horror that we are unable to construct a viable alternative to it.
I urge everyone to re-read and contemplate Willem Van Spronsen’s Final Statement with the context of Kilmar Abrego Garcia rendition to a concentration camp where people are being starved to death, the kidnaping and disappearance of anti-genocide activists, the detention of US born citizens, and the threat to expand El Salvador's concentration camp program to allow for the rendition and detention of thousands of American citizens.
Read it now, before anyone who dares to talk about it gets disappeared to a Central American death camp.
https://itsgoingdown.org/on-williem-van-spronsen/
#USPol
interpersonal violence, deportation, drugs, rural things
I remember, as a kid and adolescent, watching planes fly overhead, far far away. They were just lines, contrails, going from one side of the horizon to the other.
I'd flown a few times. My grandparents lived in Hawaii. They were pretty well off. I'd been there a couple of times. A lot of the folks I knew had never left whichever little town we lived in at the time.
My mother left California for a lot of reasons. Really we couldn't afford it after my parents divorced. The economic pressure of Regan's America destroyed a lot of families and made the (old) American dream unreachable. Rural Oregonians hated Californians because... I don't know... Because they hated a lot of things.
Both of my parents lived in various trailer parks before moving further into the country. We occasionally lived in trailer parks even in the rural area.
Living in the country is different. It stays the same for a long time, generations. The run down grocery store in the middle of town was built in the 1800's when the place was settled. The building was never updated, at least on the outside. The ideology was basically the same. The school taught about how Manifest Destiny made America great, Jim Crow was bad but MLK fixed it, Malcolm X and the Black Panthers were either not mentioned at all or only mentioned as unhelpful in comparison to nonviolence.
I didn't really know any black folks until I was 18 or 19. There was one black guy in the town I went to highschool in. He was adopted. There were a few hispanic folks, but they were generally pretty segregated. I remember one of the white kids breaking up, I assume broken up with, a hispanic girl who spoke limited english. After their breakup, she just disappeared. There were stories that he had called INS (before ICE) and that she had been illegal.
I remember being on the bus once and one of the kids talking about how he finally beat up his dad. His dad had beat him and his mother for years and he finally beat his dad up. He was proud. He was a bully who regularly started fights and intimidated people.
Most of my senior class didn't graduate. I dropped out half way through because I had enough credits to get a diploma. A few folks did this. A lot of people just did meth and went to work at the mill. A kid who was a Sr before I was a freshman robbed the Circle K with an air pistol and went to prison.
Folks who lived on the same street as the police station knew what a patrol looked like. There was only one cop on patrol at a time and response times could be two hours if something happened at the farthest extent of a patrol.
The kid had planned that part out, but, of course, the person working at the store knew exactly who he was because that's how small towns work. I don't remember if he wore a mask or not. It wouldn't have mattered if he did.
People thought that the US should invade Mexico to stop the migration. People thought that the US had the god given right to invade Canada. People thought that indigenous people didn't exist, even though one of our classmates was Blackfoot... But everyone saw him as white, even when he pointed it out.
People who aren't white were "the OK ones," or invisible, or actually the enemy, depending on who you were and who they were. There were really racists, straight up klansman, but they were rare and mostly made fun of. The pervasive racism and misogyny was not the dedicated and explicit one of incels and vocal bigots, but a deep ignorance.
The government was far away. There were cops, sometimes. The local government was wildly corrupt and opaque. You were either in the good-ol-boys club or you didn't know how it worked. There is no electoral integrity in rural America... And that's why all of this is so familiar.
Rural folks voted for what they knew. They voted for what was familiar. The hand of the state is most strongly felt in cities. Trans folks would have been killed, so they were invisible there. Gay folks would have been killed, but that became a bit less of a thing as time went on.
Sex Ed was basically non-existent. The church has all the power. They say abstinence, and that's what kids learn. The idea that abortion should even be legal was something I was debating with people in the late 90's.
Basically, government policies didn't impact people except when "the liberals shut down the mill to save the spotted owl" which collapsed the already weak economy. What government programs didn't help people, or were invisible. Disabled people weren't visible because there was no infrastructure.
What I'm saying is that all the people Trump will hurt are people that rural folks don't think about, are ignorant about, or don't care about. They know that it makes city liberalis mad, and that's all they care about. The system has been fucked for them for generations and Trump was finally an opportunity to make it fucked for everyone. He's the corrupt sheriff of every small town. He's the crooked mayor who's rigging elections and embezzling. He's familiar.
There are plenty of rural leftists. I was a Communist before being an anarchist, and I picked that up partially from my friends. But the dominant culture is strong. Most of the people who voted for Trump have no idea what they did, and no idea how many people around them they will hurt... Including their families and theirselves.
The real hard analysis to accept is that we have failed to help rural America for so long, and it has decayed so far, that it was easy for rich fascists prey in that weakness. Liberalism has failed. It's failed to protect vulnerable people in cities and it's failed to improve the living conditions of folks outside of them. It has failed to offer real hope... And without hope people are vulnerable to revenge.
I know we're all really anxious right now. There are ways to deal with that anxiety outside of the doom scrolling that you're probably doing right now... Or whatever other avoidant behavior you're probably also engaging in.
We naturally try to avoid bad feelings, like fear and anxiety. We may spiral on what-if scenarios that let us imagine all sorts of horrible things without ever facing them.
But there are practices that suggest that the best way. Instead of trying to avoid the anxiety created by fear, we can directly face the thing we fear the most. Buddhists have a meditation on death. This is referenced in The Book of the Five Rings, which is itself referenced in the film Ghost Dog... Which... If you do need a distraction, is a really good movie.
This can be adapted to deal with any anxiety. Choose the thing that makes you most afraid. Instead of figuring out how to avoid it, or imagining yourself being saved from it, imagine it has already happened. What happens next? Is there something else scary that could happen? Imagine that happening. Keep going until there's nothing left to be afraid of.
In the end, there is death. There is the heat death of the universe. There is void, and there is nothing to fear in that void. Rather, there is beauty in the fact that we ever got to experice anything at all. In this instant, you are safe. In this instant, you have everything you need. Nothing that happens next can take away this instant from you.
So let's try it, for the anxiety many Americans are feeling...
Hope feels crazy right now, in the face of everything. But that frenetic energy, resisting against impossible odds, is exactly the thing we need.
Hegemony is about controlling what is normal and sounds sane. It's about controlling what is possible. It's about making you feel crazy for not fitting in. Ultimately it's about making everyone feel uncomfortable about themselves, and making everyone feel alone in that discomfort.
So there are two questions we should all be asking ourselves and eachother:
1) What kind of world do I want to exist?
2) What is the smallest achievable step I could take towards that?
As it turns out, humans are way smarter in groups than alone, so this is a group activity. In the lead up to the French Revolution, agitators used to put together dinners with wine. When everyone was a little buzzed, they would direct the conversation towards the monarchy. It turns out that people living under authoritarianism often feel alone in their discomfort (but in reality, rarely are).
So why not have a hope party? Get your friends together, take a break from the horror that is and talk for a bit about what could be. Humans have done really amazing things throughout history (regardless of the small group of people who want you to forget that).
Tell stories, think about what's possible, and then challenge and support eachother to take steps towards that vision.
Edit: make it a #SolarPunk themed party for extra credit. ;)
There is no electoral path to end genocide. There is no electoral path to stop, or probably even to slow, climate change. The political system is utterly incapable of addressing any large scale problem, from COVID to microplastics, because benign governments cannot protect themselves against the financial sector and malignant ones are the financial sector.
This is not actually a problem, if we realize that governments have never existed to protect us but rather have always existed to keep us from protecting ourselves. They have never existed to facilitate coordination between people, but to control and limit it.
As Americans move closer to making the choice between a candidate who grudgingly supports genocide or a candidate who enthusiastically supports genocide, it's time to imagine what society would look like if we could actually shape it. What would your daily life look like? What would the world look like? What would be the priorities of humanity if we all got to choose together?
We have to work backwards from what we want to figure out how to make it happen. Fear is a powerful motivator for destructive actions, but it suppresses creative and constructive ones. Authoritarianism traps us in a fear spiral. We must dream to escape.
We have to start with hope to motivate us to build the world we want to see. Hope, a vision of something good, has always been the thing that moves humanity forward. Hope motivates creative action, resistance, and resilience.
Hope feels crazy right now, in the face of everything. But that frenetic energy, resisting against impossible odds, is exactly the thing we need.
Hegemony is about controlling what is normal and sounds sane. It's about controlling what is possible. It's about making you feel crazy for not fitting in. Ultimately it's about making everyone feel uncomfortable about themselves, and making everyone feel alone in that discomfort.
There is no electoral path to end genocide. There is no electoral path to stop, or probably even to slow, climate change. The political system is utterly incapable of addressing any large scale problem, from COVID to microplastics, because benign governments cannot protect themselves against the financial sector and malignant ones are the financial sector.
This is not actually a problem, if we realize that governments have never existed to protect us but rather have always existed to keep us from protecting ourselves. They have never existed to facilitate coordination between people, but to control and limit it.
As Americans move closer to making the choice between a candidate who grudgingly supports genocide or a candidate who enthusiastically supports genocide, it's time to imagine what society would look like if we could actually shape it. What would your daily life look like? What would the world look like? What would be the priorities of humanity if we all got to choose together?
We have to work backwards from what we want to figure out how to make it happen. Fear is a powerful motivator for destructive actions, but it suppresses creative and constructive ones. Authoritarianism traps us in a fear spiral. We must dream to escape.
We have to start with hope to motivate us to build the world we want to see. Hope, a vision of something good, has always been the thing that moves humanity forward. Hope motivates creative action, resistance, and resilience.
When I say things like "it's up to us" and "no one will save us," I don't mean it in any kind of abstract way. We have to disrupt hundreds of years of entrenched power in order to keep billions of people from dying. That means all of us. That means you.
You are important. The things you do are important. We have all been sold a version of history where one great person (usually a man) does something, and it changes the world for everyone. That story is a lie. It may even be the opposite of the truth.
Change comes from social networks, by lots of people working together (often without knowing it), whose ideas are often captured and voiced by a few individuals. History recognizes those individuals as the cause of social change, rather than a late stage effect.
What you say and do today will shape the world we live in tomorrow. What do you want that to look like?
One thing you can do to achieve that is just to ask this question with a couple of your friends and talk it out. Every conversation you have about what could be brings it closer to actually being.
hex