Most of the “common sense” tactics for avoiding surveillance that are common amongst the left are anything but. How “wearing indescript clothes helps you avoid surveillance” became “wear black bloc even to events where you stand out and don’t blend into a crowd” is beyond me but this is clearly an issue beyond that one example.
TWO HOURS AGO: an incredible photo taken by a ut austin student capturing something deeply poetic in my opinion, a line of state troopers eagerly waiting to arrest student protesters standing just behind a sign that reads "what starts here changes the world. its starts with you and what you do each day."
There are images of decomposed bodies wearing what appear to be scrubs... with their hands tied. Meaning they were executed while bound. I will not be sharing them because I'm tired of showing our martyrs' bodies to people.
I really like that post you made a while back talking about how Freud considered religion a collective neurosis, and how things like political rallies, drug subcultures, etc etc are different ways of filling that psychic "gap" from western secularization. What works of his did he focus on that topic in, and do you know any later writers who carry that analysis forward?
totem and taboo and civilization and its discontents are probably the most relevant, adorno and horkheimer also address similar things in dialectic of enlightenment, OMG and how could i forget adornos essay on astrology, the stars down to earth. another book i read that influenced my thoughts on this was drugs addiction and initiation: the modern search for ritual, its from a jungian perspective which im critical of but it had some interesting stuff nonetheless. i also was reading a lot of things at the time about the rise of modernity in europe and the social role of rituals in politics, and the history of fascist festivals and also socialist festivals, and their uses. theres a lot of academic writing on these topics if you look them up. similar themes are in ernst bloch's heritage of our times, max webers writing, and a lot of social theory and psychology that was coming from central europe in the late 19th and 20th century
also this is not like directly making this point but i think that most history about the rise of occultism and new age spiritualism in europe in a period of increasing industrialization and alienation kind of indicates what im talking about
Dispatches from the Solidarity Encampment at Columbia University
https://crimethinc.com/Columbia2024
In this in-depth report, participants offer a blow-by-blow account of the events at Columbia, appraising the tactics that the demonstrators have employed and the challenges that they face.