Tequila_Wolf

Tequila_Wolf wrote

Keith Breckenridge's Biometric State: The Global Politics of Identification and Surveillance in South Africa, 1850 to the Present. It was good.

Here's the abstract:

Biometric identification and registration systems are being proposed by governments and businesses across the world. Surprisingly they are under most rapid, and systematic, development in countries in Africa and Asia. In this ground-breaking book Keith Breckenridge traces how the origins of the systems being developed in places like India, Mexico, Nigeria and Ghana can be found in a century-long history of biomet- ric government in South Africa, with the South African experience of centralised fingerprint identification unparalleled in its chronological depth and demographic scope. He shows how empire, and particu- larly the triangular relationship between India, the Witwatersrand and Britain, established the special South African obsession with biomet- ric government, and shaped the international politics that developed around it for the length of the twentieth century. He also examines the political effects of biometric registration systems, revealing their con- sequences for the basic workings of the institutions of democracy and authoritarianism.

In particular, it's interesting for showing how the form of the state in Africa is of a different type to that of its colonial neighbours, and actually that its constructed in relation to biometrics, which is an alternative way of thinking about governance to the pre-existing ones, including Foucault's biopolitics or Scott's high modernism.

Super useful for thinking about how biometrics as an originally eugenic practice is coming to structure borderization in North-South relations more and more. Also for thinking about how these ugenic practices over a century came to be the backbone of South Africa's welfare system and increasingly global south cash transfer systems.

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Tequila_Wolf wrote

Reply to by Possum_Bride

There are direct actions that are low-risk. Like the ones which are not illegal and are thought to be helpful generally. Why not focus on those?

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Tequila_Wolf OP wrote

Seems to me it's only said that we are much more than our rational elements, and especially understanding rationality through the lens of the enlightenment. Here are the two lines with the term "rational" in them:

Abandoning the baggage of Enlightenment rationality, maximalism needs to recognise that human beings are first and foremost creatures of passion and irrationality, and only secondarily reasonable beings.

The rationalist discourse of Enlightenment political philosophy can only hope to address the rational faculties. For many people, these remain undeveloped, blocked or coded as off-limits, and thus communication at this level remains stymied and ineffectual.

I'd be curious to hear what issue you take with these words, since they seem reasonable enough to me.

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Tequila_Wolf OP wrote (edited )

First time coming by this text. I had heard of Bellamy Fitzpatrick mentioning this notion of Maximalism before at one stage but didn't know it came from Moore.

Moore is a very good writer here and in what else I remember reading of his. Clear and strong. If you have not read this, it's a few pages and worthwhile. I should be reading more of his stuff.

One thing that was unexpected was his favourable engagement with schizoanalysis, specifically Perez's book On An(archy) and Schizoanalysis. I didn't know that Moore had much exposure to that line of thinking emerging from Deleuze and Guattari. Pretty significant connection.

Another thing was that I had never heard of anarchist psychoanalyst Otto Gross before. Between Fanon, Mbembe, Gross, Rolnik, and Deleuze and Guattari, there seems to be some very interesting anti-colonial and insurrectionary psychological work worth coming to grips with.

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Tequila_Wolf wrote

Indigenous cosmologies are the fabric of indigenous societies, since there's no separation of the religious and the political and the social etc. in them.
Understanding them as a thing on their own is to take them out of their context (which they nowadays often are).
They are important to how anarchic groups cohere over time without states forming.

People here use witchcraft for all sorts of things. One thing its useful for anarchists is as a counter to techno-capitalist necessity, i.e. a set of values to stick with, to avoid subjecting yourself into a commodity or a instrument.

Another thing its useful for is opacity.

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Tequila_Wolf wrote

Reply to comment by MayShine in Bon Clay is the GOAT by MayShine

Yeah Bon Clay is awesome. It's interesting thinking about how Oda can depict queerphobia even in some of the main characters but also write such amazing queer characters, and have queer undercommon utopias in the world's harshest prison.

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Tequila_Wolf wrote (edited )

Reply to comment by lentils in Friday free talk by lentils

Yeah but the spices/oils/etc you use are really the key. What about those.

Also there are loads of different types of lentils.

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Tequila_Wolf wrote (edited )

No worries.

Having chatted about it I have the sense that even I didn't have a full grip of what was ok to be on the site and ziq didn't have a full grip of what was on the site wrt this kind of content. I was surprised about the latter because it's definitely the kind of stuff I notice, but I understand how stuff can slip through the cracks. With that all in mind and after hearing ziq's reasoning about it and one or two other things, I accept the reasoning.

So I'll be doing some adjusting over the next little while, get a better sense of what's possible/reasonable, and probably rebirth the direct action forum and emphasize its more general application.

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Tequila_Wolf wrote (edited )

Ha, I started this wanting it to be brief. I’ve had one quick read through of what is available to see, which for me is slightly more than what y’all can see but it doesn’t add much.

u/ziq it’d be great if you’d find a way to update me on what happened on whatever platform you are comfortable. Also curious to hear what happened to the Direct_Action forum, I only realised reading this post that it is gone.
Without that information I won’t be able to say anything definitive, so feel welcome to stop reading here if you want that from this wall of text.

Couple things worth saying right out the gate is that basic moderator practice for sanity and safety is to have no tolerance for brand new accounts that are being dodgy.
So regardless of how dodgy the original post was, (which considering that that ziq even redacted some of their own comments relates to something that shouldn’t even be mentioned), the user coming back and reposting it when they did is a serious red flag before establishing what is appropriate to do, imo is more than enough reason to show they are in bad faith. It reads to me like someone responding dismissively knowing (asserting) that what they are doing is right in a specific context while ignoring broader context.

This is a common pattern for shit-stirrers and it may help to imagine it in a different context.
Imagine a person whose first posts include a racist slur. They are banned and the post removed. Then the person makes a new post, and thinks they are righteous because they believe (or can somewhat plausibly argue) they used it in some specific kind of way or meant it in a “non-racist” way or whatever. So their post from their second account says they were “banned for saying ‘slur’”, and they repeat the slur instead of any number of more thoughtful ways to engage. At that point, you’d have already burned out your options for consideration for me and I’d be responding similarly to how ziq did. I’d be assuming that the person feels entitled and righteous in the way they are insisting. They try to act like that’s not what they were doing all along then you look at their username, lol, and their credibility just goes further down the toilet.

There were also also some clear misunderstandings (on a charitable interpretation) or weasely actions (on a regular interpretation) that came from arsonal that reinforce that view as time goes on. Like the one ziq identifies here, but there are more. By then to me it’s just confirming more of the same in relationship that was dead in the water. That brand new dodgy account with its whole project is done and has no place on the site. Even more so if they start seeking broader support for their half-assed project.

I’m sure many of you are familiar with it, but it’s common for people to go on ‘anti-authoritarian’ righteous crusades (what I assume is our equivalent of a concern troll as ziq called them) against mods about their posts being deleted where they aren’t owning their shit even as they’re messing it everywhere, making emotional and administrative work for people who have to handle it. So assuming that ziq wasn’t mistaken that the user posted the link more than once after the original problem, that’s enough for me to identify the person as being in bad faith who should be considered hostile.
The final quote in your post also hints of this crusadism to me and undermines the post as a whole. Whether it’s right or not depends on information I don’t have. But ziq doesn’t have a history of making shit up for no reason like this.

Lastly we’ve had some meaningful conversations before about how we don’t want the ToS to have detailed sharp-lined rules. It just enables weasely pedantic lawyering and undermining the complexity of reality. I’m surprised it seems desirable to anybody. So just going to highlight that even aside from the original problem, the person’s response is enough to maintain the ban (unless for some implausible reason ziq fabricated that there was more there than what u/arsonal claimed there was in those original posts, which just doesn’t make sense given all the other stuff on the site that doesn't get deleted)

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Tequila_Wolf OP wrote

I don't know about you but this seems like a huge oversight, especially in how people talk about open source software in general.

It's hard not to assume that Whatsapp's encryption doesn't have a backdoor, for example. And Whatsapp is supposedly using Signal's. I dunno.

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