Recent comments in /f/anticiv

Tequila_Wolf OP wrote

Reply to comment by 256 in In the second of my series on why pro-civ people should try harder, let's have a quick look at diabetes. by Tequila_Wolf

What I get from that is that we cannot use these formalised flags (anti-civ, civ etc.) to refer to complex issues.

I'm not 100% clear how your paragraph about veganism has anything to do with this, or how you imagine veganism to work in the event we move towards a more anarchic world.

Are you aware that cows etc require mined cobalt supplements in our current world also, because of the extractive nature of civilisation? It is meat-eaters who are consuming the most mined cobalt.

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256 wrote

Reply to In the second of my series on why pro-civ people should try harder, let's have a quick look at diabetes. by Tequila_Wolf

Trying to save one species by eradicating another is worse than a zero-sum.

Discourses around civilisation often miss that the installation and abolishment of civilisation cannot differentiate adverse outcomes, assumingly because civilisation is too complex too grasp or control.

When a drug is tested and it is found out that the illness it tries to cure has different types and the types are not really distinguishable, apart from the response to the drug; when it is found out that one part of the ill people gets cured by the drug, while another significant part gets killed by the drug, many ethical frameworks would question the drug.

I don't really know if diabetes and civilisation are related in any way, but counting who gets killed where is not enough.

Once I made quick calculation here about veganism, which is not as threatening as diabetes, where I estimated that some 80-100 tons of cobalt are needed for B12 every year if every person globally was vegan. Holding the position of abolishing mining could lead to abolishing artificial B12 by a 'short-sighted' logic. Mining of cobalt now is in the scale of several hundred thousand tons of cobalt per year though, so incomparable. B12-'mining' and battery-grid-scale cobalt mining are completely different categories.

What I get from that is that we cannot use these formalised flags (anti-civ, civ etc.) to refer to complex issues.

Nevertheless, here are some buzzwords:

a) Large scale mining / chemical production causes death and suffering.

b) Not treating illnesses produces preventable deaths and suffering.

c) Treating some illnesses might sometimes require large scale extraction and processing.

d) Not doing a) or b) does not necessarily cancel the outcomes of the respective other one out, i.e. 'preventable-suffering-anti-civ' and 'suffering-pro-civ' may not have the solutions to each others problems.¹

e) Solving problems might not look like trench warfare with clear polarisation, i.e. it might not matter when spaces are defended and it might not matter to profiteurs of each POV who resists them.²

¹I assume this is because of the 'future-facing' problem conception of both POV.

²Fuck querfront though, so this is incomplete.

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Tequila_Wolf OP wrote

Reply to comment by Tequila_Wolf in In the second of my series on why pro-civ people should try harder, let's have a quick look at diabetes. by Tequila_Wolf

It's also in this light that we can understand the quote from the CrimethInc poster about beauty:

To see beauty is simply to learn the private language of meaning which is another's life - to recognize and relish what is.
Beauty must be defined as what we are, otherwise the concept itself is our enemy.
Why languish in the shadow of a standard we cannot personify, an ideal we cannot live?

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Majrelende wrote (edited )

Reply to comment by monday in In the second of my series on why pro-civ people should try harder, let's have a quick look at diabetes. by Tequila_Wolf

I think they would certainly be nice, but it's the same as diabetes. Don't forget that under civilisation, transgender people have been generally oppressed, and it appears that with the rise of right-wing ideologies worldwide, the present window of inclusivity's days seem to be numbered. (as with past windows of inclusivity conveniently forgotten to appease the narrative of progress)

It's the same as diabetes, I think. I am basically on my own, for one, and if half the trans people in the world live in unwelcoming countries, then much more than half are being denied socially santioned transition. Modern remedies might be good for those who can get them, but they are typically limited to certain privileged people in conducive social environments, and I don't see that likely to change positively in the future; rather, the opposite.

It's better to have a small, non-transphobic society that does its best for transitioning than waiting for a perfect revolution (that somehow doesn't go rotten) to create a civilised utopia wherein it is supposed that all humanseveryone generally gets what they want. at the expense of the rest of life.

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Tequila_Wolf OP wrote

Reply to comment by Majrelende in In the second of my series on why pro-civ people should try harder, let's have a quick look at diabetes. by Tequila_Wolf

And remember, diabetes treatment is not all or nothing. Here is an article I found on the topic: https://web.archive.org/web/20230507122526/https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8941016/

I imagined that something like this might be the case but I was not familiar of any confirmed plants that could do the work.

I think this should be a wiki page, or something similar.

You are welcome to do that if you like.

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Tequila_Wolf OP wrote

Reply to comment by RanDomino in In the second of my series on why pro-civ people should try harder, let's have a quick look at diabetes. by Tequila_Wolf

I said state-forms, which is a more general political notion including states, denoting any apparatus that seeks to capture relations in a territory and structure them in advance of people's interaction with the territory itself, creating social stratification in that territory.

Churches and other hierarchical institutions would be included among these, but so would any reified ideas, like present-day notions of justice or happiness.

I would rather not say what anarchism is in relation to this, but I do think that anarchists typically are against all state-forms, and we seek to escape structured by them through our practices of prefiguration (organising ourselves with different sets of relations in a territory) and bypass them to destroy them through collective and individual direct action.

If you're having any more trouble, let me know what about, and we could probably recommend you something to engage.

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LajkaBear wrote (edited )

Reply to comment by RanDomino in In the second of my series on why pro-civ people should try harder, let's have a quick look at diabetes. by Tequila_Wolf

Anarchism = not a single rock placed atop another?

Correct. Anarchism is when all rocks are flying in a perfectly egalitarian, horizontal manner in the general direction of anybody who suggests that anarchism is a statism with a human face or whatever the fuck you are trying to convey with this really shitty metaphor.

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Tequila_Wolf OP wrote (edited )

Reply to comment by RanDomino in In the second of my series on why pro-civ people should try harder, let's have a quick look at diabetes. by Tequila_Wolf

No, capitalism is just one particular form of civilisation. Assuming it's useful to say more, civilisations have been around for millenia and are characterised well enough in the general description of them on wikipedia, while capitalism is generally understood to have emerged out of feudalism in Europe at the end of the middle ages. What they both have in common is state-forms and state-thinking as normalising processes which decide in advance what may be thinkable or doable.

Why do you ask?

Edit: I edited my post to make this clearer, thanks!

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