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An_Old_Big_Tree OP wrote

Lockdown started this morning at 0.00 here.

Gonna watch these films that I haven't seen yet, along with these films, if I have time. There's still infinite organising to be done so I'm still figuring out what it means to also potentially do stuff that isn't that.

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An_Old_Big_Tree OP wrote (edited )

Agamben, Camatte, and Vaneigem have all written stuff on coronavirus that I gotta go read. Agamben wasn't taking it seriously initially but his more recent stuff is better, I'm told.

I didn't know that Camatte was still alive, lol, but I'm curious to see what one of the grandparents of anti-civ have to say about these things.

Those readings can be found at https://ill-will-editions.tumblr.com/ and http://autonomies.org/, afaik.

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BrowseDuringClass1917 wrote

Just finished my adderall script, wondering if I should chance it going to the pharmacy or just go without for the foreseeable future.

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celebratedrecluse wrote

I'm okay, I just spent 10 hours trying unsuccessfully to clean install windows on a gaming computer however. Lol.

A media driver needed is missing.

I swear to Christs I am going to lose all composure if i read that again on the monitor lol

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emma wrote

boris johnson has covid-19, lmao

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El_Sabate wrote

We're finishing up our first week of officially being quarantined for coronavirus, we should be getting results as to whether we have it or not soon-ish, I'd guess early next week. Kids are a bit cabin-fevery, but they play well with each other so it's not too bad.

Work is insane as I'm trying to craft state-wide policy on continuing education on a very short time-line while also taking care of a sick family.

I hope the rest of you are well and your friends and family are safe.

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rot wrote

i hate webcams

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mofongo wrote

My sweet ball of happiness is feeling neglected that I'm not paying as much attention since I started working from home. It breaks my heart a lot. 💔

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existential1 wrote (edited )

I'm struggling a bit mentally now that LA is having what was expected, mass cases among the homeless population. If he's still alive, my father would be one of those people with a lot of issues that would make him quite vulnerable.

And I keep going back-and-forth about if I should be playing video games or just working in my garden and seed-production area so I can have lots of seedlings to give people in 20 days or so. Battling a bit of escapism and practical things I can be doing in the here-and-now.

Also been reading this collection of afro-anarchists I made a week or so ago: https://raddle.me/f/books/108084/i-made-a-collection-of-all-of-the-anarchist-s-library-s

I'm 80% through it. It has been really good, but it also really makes me critique the idea that anything people hold dearly can be abolished. Like, people wanting to abolish gender or abolish race while still holding their gender & race identities as things worth preserving.

Framed through the model given by Dr. Ibram X Kendi as it relates to race, there are 1. racist ideas 2. assimilationist ideas and 3. anti-racist ideas. And it really seems like a lot of people calling themselves abolitionists or "critical" or whatever are actually assimilationist. For to truly abolish something in a material sense and in your mind, it needs to cease to exist. That goes for a lot of black liberation people as well. You can't be a liberated black person if you're a black person. Intrinsic to the term "black person" is the relation it has to non-black people.

Anyways, a lot going on, obviously.

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existential1 wrote

Idk how short you want your hair, but I've literally gone to a barber maybe 1x in my life. Get some clippers...put the guard on the length you want...cut your entire head in every direction to make sure it's even. Real simple if you don't mind short hair. I actually don't use a guard so my hair is always bald/stubble.

But if you're using scissors, I can't help you at all. Ignore everything you just read. Lol.

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mofongo wrote

I should get my daughter a helmet, she's always bupping her head with something.

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An_Old_Big_Tree OP wrote (edited )

Framed through the model given by Dr. Ibram X Kendi as it relates to race, there are 1. racist ideas 2. assimilationist ideas and 3. anti-racist ideas. And it really seems like a lot of people calling themselves abolitionists or "critical" or whatever are actually assimilationist. For to truly abolish something in a material sense and in your mind, it needs to cease to exist. That goes for a lot of black liberation people as well. You can't be a liberated black person if you're a black person. Intrinsic to the term "black person" is the relation it has to non-black people.

Mbembe does a lot of interesting stuff in relation to this kind of argument, pointing out how Blackness and Africa became historically linked ideas and how Pan-Africanists perpetuated this, even though for him this is building race up instead of dismantling it. There are a bunch of other examples too.
(In Critique Of Black Reason, link can be found in w/decolonial)

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An_Old_Big_Tree OP wrote

And I keep going back-and-forth about if I should be playing video games or just working in my garden and seed-production area so I can have lots of seedlings to give people in 20 days or so. Battling a bit of escapism and practical things I can be doing in the here-and-now.

Are there no ways for you to organise from home?

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ziq wrote

I think it'll just make capitalists a more exclusive club the more the economy tanks. The middle will fall away and there'll just be billionaires and poor people.

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existential1 wrote

I'm thinking instead of a rundown, it might be helpful to "title" the subsections that are already there. That way, I can make the wiki into an eBook collection and have something better to name each collection than the number formatted {I., II., III., IV., etc}.

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existential1 wrote

Didnt finish it...but did get through quite a bit. I do get the feeling, like I do with a lot of "critical theory", of an overwhelming sense of "I get it, but I have no idea what to do with this."

From what I mentioned before about what I was thinking that lead to your suggestion to this stuff, it leaves me with the sense that I need to figure out a way to make this knowledge "liveable" in a sense for more than just myself but in a non-performative way.

Excellent read so far though.

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An_Old_Big_Tree OP wrote (edited )

I live it. It allows for an insurrectionary ethic of repair, the permanent dismantling of enclosures as a non-normative / anti-authoritarian process. A cartographic/geographic conception of the human as a fully disenclosed world means we can keep conceptions of humanness (humanness stolen by colonialism and exclusions) without reproducing the ways that the human as a fixed concept has always been stratified. Humanising oneself being the permanent seeking out and puncturing/breaking/setting-in-motion of enclosures, and humanness being a fully-disenclosed world, is just doing anarchy for an anarchic world.

So in short this text and its (huge) Deleuzian underpinnings are the metaphysical grounds of my whole politics, with it's own consequences for ethics/politics/cosmology that reverberate the whole way through from that ground, for an internally consistent politics through-and-through, that kicks the shit out of boring simplistic rejections of metaphysics, or god forbid dialectical materialism.

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existential1 wrote

Yeah. I feel like I need to dump nearly every group I'm working with right now Cuz they just aren't there. Maybe only a handful of ppl are there in my group.

For my situation, I'm imagining the hell I'd catch for even bringing up the subtext of this with a prison abolition group I work with that is 99% PoC and very very very attached to their PoC identities as a grounding mechanism for organization. I participate with that group out of a dedication to the work of abolition, not being rooted in identity. Same with the Black Lives Matter contingent that is made up of a lot of similar folks. Then the mostly white socialist crowd here...yikes. Thats what I mean when I mentioned how to bring others along.

My initial inclination is that it is a mighty tall task. I already spend a lot of time when working with those groups having conversations with myself about the limits of their work given the bounds by which they organize it or associate with each other.

That isn't to say there isnt a lot of good shit that gets done. But...its just so limited and it bothers me.

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