Certainly, I am glad it is interesting :)

Hierarchical parent/child relationships are easily justifiable, even self-styled anarchists are quick to justify them.

This is not untrue, but I don't know if it's a good thing that this is the case.

black and orange flag is yucky

wait, what? that's, one of the varients of the queer anarchist flag, right?

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Symboly_smerov_anarchizmu.png

I think there are two issues. One, is the issue of whether the workers control the revenues of their labor, or if part of it is siphoned off to create "profit" for third parties.

Second, is the issue of whether the workers have autonomy and meaningful choice in the circumstances and manner and quantity, conditions of their work. That is, whether their consent is active and meaningful and consistent through the entire labor process, and to what extent that consent is manufactured rather than authentic.

The thing is, these issues are ubiquitous throughout the economy. They aren't particular to sex work at all. But instead of interrogating these questions meaningfully, and defining one's terms and getting into the specifics of these questions in the context of sex work...usually the critiques of sex work in the social discourse created by statist politics, seem to rely heavily on the mystification of sex work as "uniquely oppressive", and totally ignore how the issues of sex workers heavily overlap with the issues facing basically all proletarianized people.

That isn't to say, that there aren't particular circumstances that are unique to sex work. Certainly, there are unique hazards and difficulties, which others could speak to. However, I just mean to say that, many of these often cited problems with sex work as it looks like in many situations today, are actually problems seen in many sectors of industry and commerce. They are the problems of capitalism, and exploitation, which affect many different types of people, and which I don't think can fairly be attributed to sex work alone, even if it looks particularly unique to someone outside the industry who hasn't thought about their possible shared struggles and the commonalities of experience they might have in common with sex workers.

various cannabinoids, particularly THC, are immunosupressant. So, almost certainly yes. Smoking cannabis when you are sick with a respiratory infection tends to make things worse, and the patient heal slower. However, sometimes it's worth it, if the ailment is more GI related. And in some cases, this is quite a good thing, for example when the patient is facing an autoimmune condition (of which, many have GI symptoms additionally helped by the cannabis).

All medicine is a give and take operation, to some extent.

breathing in smoke, or anything that isn't good clean air, is not good for your immune system and general health. It hurts your alveoli, which reduces your ability to intake oxygen, which reduces your ability to do cell respiration across all body systems. There also may be chemicals within the vapor which have an additional effect, once they get into your bloodstream.

Nicotine, for example, is neurotoxic and has a generally negative effect on the body. It is less harmful when vaporized instead of smoked, plausibly, but there is still a negative effect. This is why it was originally marketed as a smoking cessation solution, and why health authorities tend not to recommend non-smokers begin vaping because it's not "safe" as many think it is.

as seen on Letterkenny, start taking shits where shits aren't meant to be taken

No, balloons are friendly. except when filled with hydrogen

They really won't stop until we are totally erased, will they?

I don't know entirely how, but I feel certain that the only hope for things to get better from here, is for us to try and survive whatever is coming with collective memory of who we are and what we all went through.

I made a new friend recently. They seem really cool, and things seem to be going pretty well, we have a lot of common interests and it's very easy to talk for hours enjoying every moment. However, it's been several days and I haven't heard back from them recently. I hope the friendship continues. It's weird to get used to meeting and becoming close with people again, post-lockdown era.

You should never undercut your own critique or insights, in order to pursue mass appeal. There lies the path to marginalization, normalization, and irrelevance.

However, on the other hand, it often behooves a speaker to know their audience. When I am speaking to people, I try to have a clear goal of what I am trying to communicate, and what consequence or result I would like to see take place from communicating with that audience. Some people need to hear one thing at one moment from one person, and another thing from another moment and another person. Being mindful that this is the way people communicate, people can learn to walk together through the philosophy of everyday life, by thinking about what is useful to communicate at a particular time and place. This kind of emotional strategy is a major part of what it means to do anarchy with others, in my opinion.

As a related note, I find that the more meaningful changes, in personal life and in the broader evolutionary/social sense, tend to come when people break down their preconceptions about who or what is normal. That is, it tends to be more fruitful to find ways of transgressing and transforming the categories and norms that make up everyday life, than it is to find a little tiny group of outcasts and stick close to only each other. The latter just kind of reproduces subculturalization, which is again a path to normalization, marginalization, a dead end, etc. So, in the former case, it really tends to be more interesting, in my opinion, to seek out connections and interactions with people you wouldn't normally expect to be interested in these things, and see what of the anarchic feast they find most intriguing to begin to taste. Then, just, you know, keep feeding them.

But, this is really a matter of personal preference on a certain level. I enjoy talking with all sorts of people, "normal" and not.

Not exactly what we had in mind at the focus group meeting yesterday, but thank you for sharing these powerful insights

Oh. Rose. Lol. Yes, I just got this.

I don't see the article :(

Not closely, but in my uninformed opinion, it is probably not a big threat to the nation militarily, and may even be a civilian craft doing weather observation work or whatever the PRC statement claimed. But, it's all about pumping China as this big threat. In general, it's about portraying all the "authoritarian countries" as enemies, and in a big cabal with each other. This is why there is a lot of attention on the DPRK sending soldiers to fight with Russia, and comparing China to Russia, etc. It goes back to the "Axis of Evil" rhetoric from the Bush 43 years, which itself harkens to the WW2 rhetoric.

The reality is, there isn't a grand anti-America alliance, and all these states are very different entities, with different ideologies and different geopolitical interests. I mean, there is collaboration, but it's always essentially transactional; especially post-USSR, there is very little ideologically binding Cuba to the PRC, or the DPRK to Iran, or Russia to any of these countries. In fact, in various ways they having competing or non-aligned interests; they have legacies of broken trust, of realpolitik, of genuinely different ideals and cultures.

In fact, the US benefits tremendously from this, and the major political and institutional players know that this is the case. However, this argument isn't strategic, it is a propaganda line. It's the (il)logical progression of the global Jewish conspiracy rhetoric, or the global communist conspiracy rhetoric, for a modern American audience.

Like, is TikTok really a threat to national security? Not significantly more than the very similar Silicon Valley competitor apps/platforms are, tbh. I mean, smartphones are basically spy technology designed for commercial exploitation and population control. But hyping the threat that TikTok presents to the United States, helps prepare the US populace for conflict/animosity toward China.

Here's the thing, though: an actual war with China, even non-nuclear or "contained" to third party countries, would be fucking disastrous for the. entire. world.

One example: the US military relies on vast technical superiority of the technology of its airforce, for its conventional force advantages. However, not only does the PLA have a lot of spies able to steal this information from the US defense contractors, which are all privatized and thus much more vulnerable to corporate espionage approaches than the more state-centralized PRC equivalents....the US has outsourced all of its industry to the PRC! It can't repair or maintain any of this shit independently; it would be a total nightmare to disrupt the supply chains further than they already have been.

Yet, the looming concern of recession (the UK is already in a recession apparently, projected for 2023) is a big factor that could push the US into a war. While the labor market seems resilient so far, the federal reserve is going to keep raising interest rates in order to reduce the bargaining power of labor. What is problematic about that from a systemic view, aside from the cruel agenda of reducing the bargaining power of workers, is that the interest rate increases have unpredictably delayed effects. It is very possible that they will overshoot, and create a serious economic downturn by raising the rates too high, too fast, inducing a recession. Given how stubborn the labor market has been, and how utterly unconvincing the evidence is that inflation is even being driven by workers' wages rather than a trifecta of corporate profits, years of quantitative easing funnelling capital to the rentier classes, and covid loan business fraud...it is in fact quite possible that the federal reserve's interest rate increases will cause a recession this year or the next, and yet still not reign in inflation of the US dollar as per their stated desire.

If things go poorly economically in the US, it appears that a portion of the elite feels that a moderate-temperature proxy war with China could further stimulate the economy. the conflict with Russia in Ukraine can be seen, in this light, as a training simulation, or experiment, that the establishment is running, to see how dangerous it would be to have this kind of economic and military conflict with a major nuclear armed world power. So far, the experiment with fighting Russia has been mostly successful for the West, and has not resulted in any serious consequences for them. If anything, it has been a boost to the western economy, and allowed a serious geopolitical competitor to be increasingly marginalized and their conventional army withered down and psychologically humiliated.

However, merely the economic consequences of severing trade between China and the US in the event of a conflict between Taiwan and the PRC, would cause a recession in and of itself. It is just not even comparable to the situation with Russia, because China and the US are far more economically intertwined. Plus, China has a very large army, and could quite feasibly do a huge amount of damage to the United States merely with conventional tactics. It would just be, simply put, a disaster.

So we are at an impasse. Going to war with the PRC, even though it's very inadvisable from a macroeconomic, geopolitical perspective, is exactly what consent is being purposefully manufactured for. A declining rate of profit is leading two very large world powers into conflict, even though that conflict may unsettle the balance of power internationally in a catastrophic and unforeseen fashion. Unfortunately, it is not the elites which might beget this war of choice, who will suffer-- it will be people all over the world, working class and poor people, everyday people in every nation, but most especially those in poor countries with no affinity to either faction, who will be the most vulnerable if a major conflict were to arise.

The only way to stop this, in the long term, is to change very fundamental things about our societies and the way they function. This conflict, while entirely ruinous and likely to lead to terrible outcomes, is powered by the same inexorable logic as climate change. It is vital for people in the United States, and China, and in the countries allied to both, to resist any incitement to war that would likely devastate the whole world, as well as lead to the reification of all nation states as "bulkwarks" against the chaos they themselves invited and inflamed by pursuing a policy of warfare on any scale.

Well, the (D) establishment, the presidency, seems to at least want to not want this public, if that is the case. Look at the quotes down at the bottom of the article; the pentagon, white house, everybody is minimizing this. Meanwhile, the congressional republicans and the military brass are privately talking it up.

Seems like Biden could be JFK 2.0. The last time this happened, the whole world came close to armageddon...it is a series of unlikely miracles that a nuclear exchange didn't happen during the cuban crisis, or over the Korean crisis during the 50s when McArthur wanted to drop nuclear bombs on the Chinese border, or over Vietnam/Laos/SE Asia proxy war fiasco.

This world is on a fucking tightrope. Most people just put their heads down and carry on...but it's hard for me to focus on running a library when almost nobody seems to read, or even look where we are going...

Shit is just totally out of control. I used to joke on it, now I just don't know what the fuck to say or do. Hold your loved ones close y'all...

This would be a fucking disaster.

f-droid.org probably has something useful, did you check that out? Android-like mobile OSes only, unfortunately.

For my part, I apologize for any combativeness that may have been received by my own tone; I totally understand the language barrier thing. I am currently working on my spanish, and can relate to the difficulty in discussing abstract concepts in a second or third language.

In my country, "insurrectionary" has been kind of co-opted by liberals to refer to right-wing agitation since 2021, but before that it was clearly a term that refered to anti-establishment, definitely-not-reactionary activities. This is because of the Jan 6 thing that happened up here in the USA, which is very similar to the events in Brazil in a lot of ways. This also may explain my inquisitiveness/defensiveness, as I've been trying to push back on the use of "insurrectionary" to describe fascists in my own country, you know? It feels like a counter insurgency tactic, here, when liberals have been using the term in that way, so that's just my context with that particular discourse.

Hope you are doing well today, all that aside! Greetings from USA

He was always a contrarian, frankly.

The context for this more recent stuff, is the Reality Winner fuckup by The Intercept's editors. After criticizing how they handled that situation, and the pro-Biden/DNC slant of many of the newer reporters and that same editorial staff, he left, along with another co-founder. So, since then, he's become pretty jaded with anything he sees as liberal, or influenced by liberalism, and also has become more isolated. Ironically, since he has always been a liberal, but is also a contrarian who thinks he is "above that" kind of dichotomy, this led him to be subsumed by the liberal/conservative paradigm which he did not recognize or have any substantial critique of. To people like this, it is difficult to have a meaningful conversation because their definitions are all skewed and now they're in a propaganda bubble while thinking they're outside all of the bubbles, looking in at yours. In reality, it is ridiculous to argue that anyone is outside the purview and influence of liberal politics, we are all reckoning with that and staking your identity on being "smarter" or "better informed" or whatever, leads to this kind of error. Paired with a (very unfortunate) certain sense of permission to engage with conservative social maliciousness that comes from being a violent crime/state repression victim (He was kidnapped along with his family in Brazil, as well as being stalked/targeted by American Democratic Party officials during his time in the United States for his journalism), you can kind of see how this has developed into his current personality.

One might note that he is engaging with these alt-right American accounts while he is in Brazil, which kind of removes him from having to reckon directly with the consequences of his speech arguably. One may also note that this shift has all happened post-2020, largely, which was a very isolating and strange year for pretty much everyone.

Call it, journalist-main-character syndrome, I guess. Sad to see, he was a very good (but still liberal) journalist for many years. He is also a big reason for why Bolsonaro is out of power now, still, so it's especially disappointing to see him pursuing this kind of hurtful and damaging politics...and also, just kind of bizarre, frankly.

where did they get the tank from?

the deviant loner weird kids who eat lunch by themselves, will inherit the earth? at least, I can hope. ;)

OK, I'll shoot haha

I am going to tell people inquiring about the local infoshop that they are eco-fascist, transphobic DGR Derrick Jensen acolytes, because I saw "Little Black Cart" branded bookmarks sitting on a table in the shop this one time when I visited for an event

This was something that a member of Rose City Antifa actually did, in direct private messages sent from their official social media account to a user who inquired about the infoshop and how to get involved.

The fact that, at the time (and now), there are upwards of half of the collective volunteers being queer/trans, and the bookmarks were donated and left by an unknown random (like most of our content at that time) was apparently lost on them. Although, frankly, I think that LBC has a lot of perfectly great content, and it is ridiculous to police what books or zines you are allowed to read in an anarchist infoshop lol.

In case this is not obvious...we have in our library: liberal content, socdem/progressive content, anarchist content, historical texts, authcom content, transhumanist content, technoscientific content, and yes, content from ITS/TK/etc, even some conservative/capitalist theory texts (mostly for laughs, some are caveated with inline critiques written by collective members and anarchist readers who visited the collection at various points and left their thoughts in the text margins), and other controversial texts which are of academic/intellectual significance, which we do not necessarily personally endorse the conclusions or worldviews of...because, well, we are a fucking library lol. A library which focuses specifically on controversial texts which you may not always find in the neighborhood or county libraries, to boot.

Like, what did they think we had in here? A carefully curated, ideologically pure propaganda collection? Our collective members, while united by basic principles, themselves have a diversity of viewpoints and interests...

It is literally our stated purpose to allow people to educate themselves on a variety of subjects in an environment of academic freedom, while simultaneously maintaining an affirming/safer space environment that makes it more possible for people to discuss controversial content in a constructive/interesting way. This, in our view, makes for a much more interesting discursive space, and conversations can be had which are impossible in conventional academia and hegemonic cultural spaces. And it definitely makes for a more interesting conversation, than censoring the available texts to those which are considered "legitimate". I mean, what the fuck kind of library would that make?

Sometimes, I feel that people just don't even think for two seconds before they react. Meh.

The person who RCA sent that DM to, screengrabbed it and gave us a heads up, because they thought it was such a weird thing to say, and they wanted us to know that they were saying stuff like this about us without our knowledge. I believe I kept the screenshot somewhere, despite all the chaos from our moves, because it was funny. But mostly, it's just "meh".

You have a knack for distilling what I took paragraphs to say, into two sentences. I admire people who can do that!

At any rate, I think this is great advice for me, and a lot of us who might read this. We all can benefit from taking time to learn from each other, and stepping back from emotional knee-jerk responses to an overwhelming world.

[PARODY]