Submitted by Ishkah in lobby

...and I've no idea what the likelihood is that it's benefited me or not.

From age 19 to 25 I travelled, worked on farm-stays, took odd unskilled jobs and joined lots of anarchist projects and campaigns. Most of my time was spent outdoors in rural areas, sometimes literally up a tree building a treehouse.

But the last 5 years I've been completely stationary, still living rurally in a village, working unskilled jobs and going out hiking with the dog, but devoting lots of time to being online, going from one hobby project to another:

  • My Video Essays, Editing & Mirrors – Philosophy, politics, veganism, comedy, film & music
  • My Writing – Personal growth, politics & philosophy
  • My Editing
    • Captain Hotknives Sleeve Notes Zine – Working class comedy
    • The Unfinished Autobiography of Aileen Wuornos – Hippie sub-culture, sex work & abuse
    • Ted Kaczynski Book Projects – Terrorism, political philosophy & recent history
  • My Cataloguing
    • The Radical Zine Library
    • Leftist / Vegan Community Directories
    • Anarchist Media Archive
    • Vegan Video Resource Library
    • Community Discord Directory
    • Comedy Archive
    • Leftist Debates & Discussions
    • Master lists of anarchist & vegan sub-reddits
    • Sortable table of languages by number of speakers
    • Sortable table of music genres
  • My Other Projects
    • UK Travel Master List of Resources; Free/cheap things to do and campaigns to help – Human geography research & map building
    • List of UK campaign groups & how to keep their information updated – Political movement research
    • Freegle – Map building & rule drafting
    • Leftist / Vegan YouTube Analytics – Research & website building
    • Library Information Exchange
    • Philosophical Vegan Wiki
    • Musical tribute call out

I'm not sure what the future holds, I know I want to cycle tour soon around a good length of the UK.

I would probably most enjoy doing a philosophy degree, but I also know that I can enjoy learning philosophy at my own leisure over a lifetime, so I probably want to do something like a psychology degree to then specialize in publishing papers debating ideas like in what way we learn to use folk psychological concepts.

Although I also don't know if I could really enjoy that life, I just know that I'm terrible at narrowing down my interests which is probably fairly obvious.

Finally here's my best attempt at a short list of what skilled careers I could maybe see myself doing:

  • Publishing Papers, Writing Articles & Books, Making Video Essays, Documentaries &/or Indy Films
  • Campaign Organising
  • Counselling
  • Journalism
  • Freelance Academic Researcher
  • Library or Museum Work

So yeah feel free to AMA.

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Tequila_Wolf wrote (edited )

How do your Kaczynski Book Projects relate to your writing against purist/insurrectionary anarchism?

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anarchyintheyouuuk wrote (edited )

It's the same deal: Ishkah pretends to be presenting a big brain neutral take on the subject but is really just pushing his usual agenda against anarchists of action. As well as the moral crusading, I suspect there's a financial motivation. Fortunately, it seems unlikely Ishkah's hit pieces will ever get off the ground. Publishing a book about a living person is not as easy as just copying and pasting stuff from the internet, splicing your own crappy 'commentary' in the middle, and listing the result on Amazon.

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Ishkah OP wrote

You registered an hour ago to comment on my post? I'm honored lol.

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anarchyintheyouuuk wrote

I post anonymously.

Some formerly anarchist people buy into his ideas out of a desire to view the world in a more rigidly simplistic way and leave broader campaigns behind which is often both a detriment to their own quality of life and others.

Why is it that anything not in line with your workerist dogma is a 'rigidly simplistic way to view the world'? Do you really think that your 19th century workplace democracy BS (sprinkled with Food Not Bombs NGO charity work) is some deep, rich tradition?

As a professor at Berkeley during the height of the Vietnam war protests Kaczynski would have been very aware of militant campaigns. He romanticized the anti-hero in Joseph Conrad's novel The Secret Agent. And he was angry at being a product of kind of conservative by todays standards emotionally repressed parents. And so he chose a kind of militant purism.

It always comes back to the pop-psychology with you. Not once have I ever heard you engage with Ted's ideas. Or primitivist ideas. Or post-left ideas. Or any ideas, come to think of it. Instead you copy and paste long lists of texts that you clearly haven't read and dismiss them with the word 'purist' and by telling an anecdote about the time Ted was dropped on his head as a baby or something.

It's really tiresome. Maybe you could find yourself a new hobby? Studying psychology and becoming a social worker would suit you, I think.

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Ishkah OP wrote (edited )

I haven't been able to record a discussion with a supporter of his, but here are the planning notes for a discussion.

I've had a pleasant conversation with Zerzan that delved into his arguments for primitivism.

I've had a mock debate with someone playing devil's advocate for primitivist positions here.

I engaged with post-left ideas here.

Other ideas I've addressed in depth are for example anti-freeganism and I've debated a liberal on my defence for anarchist direct action.

Instead you copy and paste long lists of texts that you clearly haven't read and dismiss them with the word 'purist'

I cataloged lots of highlights from essays arguing for ideologues at various levels of nicheness and highlights from their critiques. The highlighted critiques and the advertisement to do your own further reading into them were the main arguments for whether you should dismiss the arguments for the ideology or not. I acknowledged the purist pipeline was a distinct phenomenon and not a perfect defeater to all the ideologies listed.

and by telling an anecdote about the time Ted was dropped on his head as a baby or something.

Never done anything like that, you must be confusing this for me simply researching the way in which he related to his attacks on technology at the time as primarily a personal passion project.

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anarchyintheyouuuk wrote

Never done anything like that, you must be confusing this for me simply researching in what way he related to his attacks on technology as primarily a personal passion project.

You recorded an hour and a half long show where you and another person go back and forth over and over again about the time 1) Ted was briefly separated from his family as a child (routine practice to this day) 2) MK Ultra (discredited conspiracy theory invented by his defence to save him from the death penalty) and 3) his lack of success with women (as if Ted is the only person ever who struggled to form relationships in this hellscape we live in).

Of the hour and a half, you discussed his philosophy for maybe five minutes. As an aside, I remember this was the show where you said schooling for children should be standardised and compulsory.

While you're here, why have you registered the subreddits https://old.reddit.com/r/AntiCivilization/ and https://old.reddit.com/r/AntiCiv/ and posted techbro William Gillis's anti-primitivist screed there? In fact, why have you done this with nearly a hundred different subreddits?

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Ishkah OP wrote

Of the hour and a half, you discussed his philosophy for maybe five minutes.

Because that wasn't the purpose of the discussion. I tried organizing a recording delving into his ideas like that, but the guy stopped responding. If you'd like to record a voice discussion or work on a text discussion, I'd be delighted.

While you're here, why have you registered the subreddits https://old.reddit.com/r/AntiCivilization/ and https://old.reddit.com/r/AntiCiv/ and posted techbro William Gillis's anti-primitivist screed there? In fact, why have you done this with nearly a hundred different subreddits?

Because I like the critique, I like spreadsheeting lists to de-stress and I thought it might be nice to try and foster lots of small communities based on specialized political interests, so I created at least 30 pro specialized anarchist philosophy spaces, 8 anti-civ critique spaces, and 10 anti-civ ideological name variations to host redirect links:

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anarchyintheyouuuk wrote

If you'd like to record a voice discussion or work on a text discussion, I'd be delighted.

I live in New Zealand so the time difference would make this difficult if not impossible. Also I'd be very wary of discussing my ideas with you over voice given that only last week you said on here that you hoped the admins of a website you didn't like got arrested and locked up. I suspect the person you were talking to previously about recording something dropped out for the same reason.

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Ishkah OP wrote (edited )

I'm happy to stay up late to record something your morning time or whatever. Or we can just leave it as a text discussion.

If you don't mind using google just hit request editor role on this document or we can use Etherpad or some other document collaboration platform. I can't get disroot pad to run without it glitching though.

Also just a factual correction, I wrote that I had an intuitive feeling of disappointment that they didn't have enough evidence to conclusively connect anyone they arrested to a terror attack. I didn't say I was disappointed that they didn't have enough evidence to put them in prison for running a website, like I didn't mean I was disappointed they didn't have enough evidence to fraudulently connect anyone they arrested to a terror attack.

I felt that intuitive disappointment because I would like info on bus stop bombers to become publicly available so that they can be challenged by anarchists, just like I'm happy any time a fascist gets doxxed.

I understand the opposition to the consequentialist hypothetical I wrote after that though and I am sympathetic to it.

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Ishkah OP wrote

Yeah it's the motivation for researching his life. Some formerly anarchist people buy into his ideas out of a desire to view the world in a more rigidly simplistic way and leave broader campaigns behind which is often both a detriment to their own quality of life and others. As well I think there are comparative elements to the way some people go from valuing many anarchist campaigns to mostly just illegalism, propaganda of the deed and communiques.

As a professor at Berkeley during the height of the Vietnam war protests Kaczynski would have been very aware of militant campaigns. He romanticized the anti-hero in Joseph Conrad's novel The Secret Agent. And he was angry at being a product of kind of conservative by todays standards emotionally repressed parents. And so he chose a kind of militant purism.

I'm also interested in the phenomenon of how and why the children of defeated fascist countries grew up to have the most active rebel urban guerrilla movements. The obvious simple answer is anger at their parents generation, but how that played out in each of their lived experiences is interesting to study.

Finally, we all walk around with naive assumptions that people we know well could never be acting in evil ways, if we're ever forced to come face to face with the fact that they are, we have this realisation of the ways we were blind to being able to help people, and so the way the average person is causing harm that we never even thought about.

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Tequila_Wolf wrote

How many of your projects have you finished and how do you feel about that?

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Ishkah OP wrote

All of them bar 1 or 2. I just set out with a simple goal and built them up till I was happy with them. 1 of them the computer programmer pulled out, but I'm still happy with what we've produced, that we can easily restart it up and expect to be able to finish it one day. Many of them are obviously active projects, with mechanisms for people to add data, so they're constantly being updated.

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Tequila_Wolf wrote

What kind of campaign would you be interested in organising?

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Ishkah OP wrote (edited )

Just helping out or starting a food not bombs chapter would be nice, with conversations and leaflets, encouraging people to boycott animal agriculture and Israeli occupation.

As well, I'd like to help build the political squatting movement, that houses people and shifts the Overton window at the very least towards the council selling empty homes to charities to house and train up homeless people like Take Back the Land and Latch (Leeds Action to Create Homes).

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