Your only purpose in this thread was to dismiss anti-civs as "fuckboys" who are "appropriating tribal masculinity" (anticiv isn't a tribe and I'm sure as hell not masculine) and backhandedly accuse me of not caring about trans lives because I stated that transhumanists often appropriate the trans struggle as a weapon to attack anti-civs.

You're not the eloquent master-debater you imagine, in fact you're the embodiment of the strawman-dissemination the title of this post refers to. And your refusal to own your deliberately non-committal passive-aggressive arguments makes it even more frustrating.

I wouldn't be an anarchist if I weren't sensitive - and that sensitivity is what allows me to see right through you.

"Life itself" is nature fallacy bullshit. Spooky af. Death to Nature!

If replacing life with silicon and circuits is nature fallacy bullshit, then I have no qualms accepting that label and will wear it proudly. We've replaced much of the life that was on the planet with our petrochemical-machinations already, and being cognizant to the dangers of further environmental destruction in the name of human "progress" isn't something to shame, imo.

is literally the entire anarchist project

I disagree. Anarchists will always fail when appropriating inherently hierarchical tools and institutions and attempting to "de-hierarchy" them.

I don't see anything fantastical in what you just quoted

"Posthumans could be completely synthetic artificial intelligences, or a symbiosis of human and artificial intelligence, or uploaded consciousnesses, or the result of making many smaller but cumulatively profound technological augmentations to a biological human, i.e. a cyborg. Some examples of the latter are redesigning the human organism using advanced nanotechnology or radical enhancement using some combination of technologies such as genetic engineering, psychopharmacology, life extension therapies, neural interfaces, advanced information management tools, memory enhancing drugs, wearable or implanted computers, and cognitive techniques."

Fantastical or not, this is not a world I want to live in. I feel enough alienation as it is.

All of them - It's a basic tenant of their ideology - It's even spelled out multiple times in their manifesto:

Transhumanists hope that by responsible use of science, technology, and other rational means we shall eventually manage to become posthuman, beings with vastly greater capacities than present human beings have.

They always refute any concerns about the inevitable hierarchy that post-humans will bring simply by insisting "this time it'll be different because we're anarchists", which is an incredible lapse in logic which assumes they'll somehow control the progression of planet-altering technology:

The anxiety about tyranny and domination of the post/transhuman over the human is grounded in a perception of life and society in terms of power, dominance, and hierarchical relations, which is exactly what Anarchism wants to abolish.

So "tyranny and hierarchy won't be a problem because we like anarchism, we swear, even though we don't make up even 1% of the transhumanist movement".

You can't honestly expect to abolish the system's violence by advocating for tools that would give the system even more power to do violence.

the question is whether anticiv people support drugs & surgeries or not.

Anticivs are anarchists so we don't tell people what to do with their bodies or make up moral rules for what is and isn't kosher. Anarcho-Transhumanism isn't about subverting gender - it's about subverting life itself - that's where it shows how incompatible it is with anarchism. Wanting to live forever because you fear death - that is a profoundly destructive basis for a political movement in a world that's dying because of the staggering destruction civilized humans do.

The convergence of Anarchism and Socialism with Cosmism and Futurism that took place in the years leading up to the Russian Revolution remains a profound source of inspiration for the modern movements combining Anarchism and Transhumanism. [...] The radical extension of human life, the conquest of immortality through scientific means, the merging of human and machine.

I wouldn't have to assume if you'd engage honestly rather than flinging snarky putdowns at me every time I speak - which are clearly designed to mock me and inflict emotional damage.

I suppose it's designed to make people into property.

Since I'm anti-civ, I see civilization as being inherently violent, structural, totalitarian, alienating and hierarchy-forming - so an egalitarian industrial civilization isn't something I take seriously as a real possibility.

But the question was whether pre-industrial people were better off than industrial people - which they clearly were - since their environment wasn't on the verge of annihilation.

It's not a conflict to my mind - because being anti-civ in this dying world isn't the same as being a "primitive" person in the pre-industrial past. I can talk about (pre) history without confusing it for our current situation - a situation for which I would prescribe anti-civ theory - not primitivism.

I also know most sicknesses like myopia are caused by civilization - so trying to argue that we need more civilization to cure the very ills that civilization itself causes isn't something I can wrap my brain around.

Reason is an invention of the patriarchy.

I'm saying that anticiv has a gender problem

In what way? Because some of the people identifying as anticiv are ignorant assholes? A certain proportion of any population (most usually the majority, I'd say) are ignorant assholes. That's like hating all socialists because of Stalinists.

The main issue I have with it is it makes false promises by claiming everyone in the world will have free and equal access to technology and that somehow no hierarchy will be created between the people who "choose" to augment / genetically engineer themselves / their children and the people who don't "choose" to.

It ignores the undeniable fact that resources are limited and rapidly declining - That it would require immense energy to keep people alive in the cloud forever.

Post-scarcity is industrialist propaganda - a dangerous lie that we can just consume as much as we want forever and everything will be fine as long as we say we're left-wing.

And it likewise ignores the glaring reality that creating a "superior" race of humans that live forever and have incredible abilities won't create a brutal hierarchy.

can someone give me a good reason that the idea of a world bereft of the medical technology that we have today would be (overwhelmingly) positive?

Anti and post-civ theorists don't really make that claim so I'm not sure how to engage you here. Anarcho-primitivists might to a certain extent, but I'm not an anarcho-primitivist so I'm not the best person to present their arguments.

While many primitive societies were egalitarian, they also had people with low vision, they had deaf people, they had people with developmental or genetic differences that seriously disabled them in the context of that society. Is that primitive society somehow better without aids to those people? Does being born atypical to everyone else in those societies somehow lead to a typical outcome?

I'd argue that being disabled in an egalitarian society that actually takes care of its members and doesn't view them as a burden would be a much better experience than being disabled in our isolating authoritarian industrial society ("civilization"), where everyone is measured by their ability to earn money, yes.

You're passive-aggressively implying transhumanists don't appropriate trans lives in order to promote an ideological agenda and attack people / cultures they see as being "primitive" because we don't embrace technological supremacy and the alienating homogenization that comes with it?

You're making a dishonest appeal to emotion by lowkey accusing me and anyone that is critical of civilization of not caring about trans lives.

If you're not a transhumanist like the people I was talking about and if you don't use trans people as pawns to achieve ideological victory - then I don't get why you're being defensive as if I equated you personally with conservatives?

Actually - You're being really defensive whenever I say anything critical of transhumanism while claiming to not be transhumanist, and not to be upset, and I think it's intellectually dishonest because it makes it impossible to engage with someone who won't own their arguments.

I'm sorry but I have to disagree with you, as I feel you're misrepresenting what transhumanism is.

Being transgender isn't the same as transhumanism - and that's actually the fallacious argument that creates the "anticiv is transphobic" slander because it allows the cult to present any argument against civilization as an argument against being trans.

Transhumanism ultimately isn’t about augmenting humanity - That's just entry level - The literature overwhelmingly promotes creating a new species that transcends humanity - in order to replace it. Discarding our humanity in favor of digital immortality has nothing to do with being trans.

We don't need transhumanism to tell us to alter our bodies, we've been doing it forever and transhumanism can't claim ownership over body modification. Anticivs are fully in support of body modification and most primitive tribes practiced it long before civilization existed.

I didn't see those comments yet because I was replying to this one. Chill.

how I as an individual would go about pursuing that

What answers are you getting from transhumanism that you feel anticiv doesn't address?

it just waffles around the idea of gender without actually addressing what that deconstruction would look like

Do you mean Baedan? I have a completely different interpretation after reading it. I found it to be freeing.

"yeah you're fucked but the people of the future will thank you"

But transhumanism asks you to wait for the future - for future theoretical technologies, in order to achieve your liberation. Anticiv / gender nihilist theory is mainly focused on the here and now, on freeing your mind from domestication. It's the last politic that would ask you to suffer in silence and wait for the future generations to be liberated. It's about creating a living anarchy, both within yourself and externally to your wider environment.

Same thing can be said for the "public face" of transhumanism. Detached, lonely white boys that want to take fucking their computers to the next level (and worse, want the computers to run everyone's lives). These people aren't actually critiquing anything, they're political roleplayers that only exist in the virtual world. Anarchism is just a useful label to manifest their sexual fantasies.

Anticiv doesn't try to prophesize the future though - I actually think transhumanism does that more than any politic.. Making promises for a glorious future in the cloud the way Christians promise a heavenly afterlife to anyone who signs up.

Fantastic prophecies of world peace under cybernated systems are just empty promises that lead to burn out. With anticiv there's no promised end goal, just a call for analysis and awareness and deconstruction. This is what anarchism is - a permanent war with our minds and the domination placed on them by external and internal forces.

What exactly is your issue with anticiv critiques of civilization? How do anticivs pose a threat to trans women by critiquing some of the constructs that help create gender dysphoria and facilitate violent oppression of non-conformative outgroups?

I want to understand where you're coming from so I can address your concerns more directly.

The only difference between this and the way conservatives think is: replace lily white children with trans people.

Who will think of the children trans people???

Taxing the poor to feed the rich is neoliberalism 101.

The glass ceiling shattered but now my feet are being cut up :-(

Yes! They work so very hard to establish their identity early in life, and then spend the rest of their life working even harder to fight off anything that would disrupt it by closing their mind and lashing out.