mms4wyfu

mms4wyfu wrote

where do you draw the line?

I think "how can you reason about it?" is usually a more useful starting question than "where do you draw the line?"

I study ancient history and I wish there was more evidence.

This pretty much answers it for me. Ancient monuments give us the means to investigate history. Shitty commodity confederate trash statues--as artifacts--don't act as an exclusive window into another world. The minimal relevance they have is for their shitty racist symbolism, which is easily recorded in pictures or brief descriptions.

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mms4wyfu wrote

The root of all primitivist thought is a literal worship of the planet humans evolved on -- a sort of Gaianistic theology that assigns original sin to sentient thought and locates perfection in the evolutionary past before this sin came about.

That's the catch with aggressive boundary-drawing--you've defined primitivism so narrowly that it sounds like you're fine with the vast majority of people whose anarchist views are informed by primitivism.

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mms4wyfu wrote

James sounds pretty salty about egoist and primitivist tendencies. An egoist approach doesn't preclude someone from taking an interest in participating in meetings or in social action or in specifically opposing wage-slavery. A critique of civilization doesn't preclude resisting capitalism. A primitivist approach certainly doesn't require denouncing civilization "instead of" capitalism.

My thought is that wherever there is room for a without-adjectives approach, all efforts will likely be the better for it. My interests tend toward post-civ, but I don't begrudge those exploring transhumanist tendencies. I find egoist perspectives powerful and useful, but I'm also very interested in collaboration and community.

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