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An_Old_Big_Tree wrote

Interesting points! I've got some questions for elucidation.

Now that the era of mammals may be coming to an end, it is better to celebrate the coming of a new world, than to despair in our era's decline.

Would you celebrate a genocide if the future people would be prettier or smarter? It seems like you're setting up a dichotomy between celebration and despair/pessimism, but I don't understand why this is necessary or desirable.

I find the biological essentialism of "Nature" that is pretty prominent in many primitivist/deep green/etc spaces

Have you found that to be the case here?

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celebratedrecluse wrote (edited )

Would you celebrate a genocide if the future people would be prettier or smarter?

well, no. I am also not using "beautiful" in an anthropocentric aesthetic sense, I am speaking more metaphorically; the beauty of time & change, of nature's ability to reconstruct itself even in the face of unbelievable damage/destruction. As we humans are part of that process, i find that beautiful, in a way that transcends what i as an individual acculturated human find attractive.

Don't get me wrong. shit is fucked. everyone is miserable, and the planet is dying lol. but if we give into our depressive tendencies, we have subsumed our better nature to a socialized affect, an emotional state which is designed to keep people docile, or at least redirect any revolutionary energy into useless side affairs. So I prefer us to be able to experience this collapse in a self-conscious way, and not get trapped underneath our own hearts & minds.

It seems like you're setting up a dichotomy between celebration and despair/pessimism, but I don't understand why this is necessary or desirable.

Actually, I think I am responding to the cult of despair which is well known on /r/Collapse & /f/Collapse, which does not really elicit a political force from the people who consume the content. If anything, it appears to neutralize many people from taking actions which are sustainable & positive. Instead, I feel that people are turning inwards, "prepping" in a very narrow sense, and cultivating this totally wack sense of misanthropy. Radical politics requires collective socialization, and this stuff (while not wrong per se in many respects) doesn't get us where I personally want us to go.

It is clear to me, at least, that I am not advocating for passively celebrating the dire future that awaits us. I am trying to engage in a dialectic, to push towards the kind of synthesis you refer to. Because right now, if you take my post in its social context, I think it is fair to acknowledge it is attempting to be a counterbalancing perspective.

I find the biological essentialism of "Nature" that is pretty prominent in many primitivist/deep green/etc spaces

well, this is not a space, not to get too pedantic. It's a forum. IRL, the primitivist scene utterly imploded due to prominent men coming out as transphobic, racist...not to mention, the FBI raids on the most successful direct actionists affiliated. It was a both internal reactionary split, and an external repressive force. divide-and-conquer. the scene has not recovered in over a decade, so the "spaces" we are talking about are just online forums.

But to address what you say, rather than get caught up in definitions: Here, there is something very interesting happening, in that there is a really large queer & trans presence on the site (wooo) but also a very large gathering of ecologically concerned anarchist thought/discourse. There are limitations in what a forum can do (and any anti-civs here surely would agree), but I for one am optimistic about what sort of dank memes and propaganda we can export, as well as the digital networks we can co-create. Perhaps some of us could even take some of these connections offline and do something real with them, but that's definitely quite uncertain, and even laden with some operational danger. But overall, I feel very positively about what raddle may do, and at the least what it can represent for the anarchist deep green discourse moving forward.

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