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being misgendered is only 'bad' (aside from whatever personal pain it might cause) if you think being a man is bad. trans men definitely DO think being a woman is bad; we (trans women) talk about this all the time, how trans men think they are better than women & that being a woman is bad, etc

but aren't we (trans women) supposed to be 'better' (semi-ironically) than that ? aren't we supposed to recognize that there is nothing inherently or ontologically bad about (camab) manhood ? while simultaneously recognizing that any camab man could be(come) a woman, whatever that means ? isn't that our whole project ? so how could misgendering a trans woman be in any way politically bad, aside from, whatever, personal animus, the implied threat of possible violence (not that being gendered 'correctly' is any kind of insulation from that....) ?

responding to one of those fairly typical transwomen posts you see here & there, 'being misgendered isn't just an accident it's a deliberate attack on a marginalized group of women' blah blah..... obviously misgendering, 'accidentally' or otherwise, is generally not a good step to take if you're looking to bed wed or befriend one of us (unless it is ? there's all kinds) — but there is such a huge pool of potential social interactions outside of that, & it seems simply foolish & sort of self-sabotaging to begin from a position that 1) we immediately understand what's going on whenever someone misgenders us, & 2) what's going on is: it's an act of violence & the person doing it is, whatever, evil, dangerous, bad (or at least an unwitting representative of that). anywayy.....

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“We must produce social and critical markers that put in circulation values we think are important — and we must do that with works (literary or paraliterary) that we think are worthy of critical attention. However contestatorily, we must join in our society. We must become (to borrow a term from Bloom) strong readers of the paraliterary.”

— Samuel R. Delany, “The Para•doxa Interview”

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Tranny fag allegiance lies in the constant backstabbing backturning from straights and "queers" that is ignited from fake pedophilia/perv scares that subsequentially unticks every holy rule about namecalling/harassment/misgendering etc. The pedo hysteria is currently always built on racism allegations too because that cements the undesirability in reservation of having misconstrued something out of the sexual realm. The severity of the backlash is proportional to the idealised trust in deviants to adhere to the social slave position of being expected to uphold the freely flowing rules of conduct. A real tranny and a real fag are interchangeable in the mirrored way in which both are preceived from the outside to possibly be becoming each other, while the gauzy "group" of queers are really the ones who turn in the wind in the face of post-me too mutating conformity. The reason transexualism and gays are associated with artistic fervor is because they used to be expressions of real genetic abhorence that led to the necessity of forming your own life, moving away from your old life and molding yourself and your life into art. Now queerness is taught in school in a process that turns what used to be desperate survival tactics of opulence and confidence into template stepfordwife copies of that form. Rupaul sucked dick on camera a year before drag race. If you're "enjoying" literary sanctioned dennis cooper novels (just read samuel delany instead) but are worried about pedo scares you are a fraud. If you think kids should get access to any medical self harm devices in the name of self actualisation you are dragging the lives of all transexual and homosexual souls of the past. The fetish objects of the queer liberalist sharia, john waters paris is burning cookie mueller idfk, are themselves relics and could never happen now

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In the 1950s, when most psychologists believed that only vertebrates were capable of learning, James McConnell demonstrated that flatworms, planaria, could be trained to change their behavior. These worms are able to regenerate a whole body, including the brain, from any part of the organism. McConnell found that worms regenerated from a part, such as the tail, of a trained worm retained the knowledge that had been acquired by that worm. He also found that when trained worms were ground up and fed to untrained worms, those worms learned the behavior more easily. He suggested that RNA molecules synthesized following the worm’s training might be responsible for distributing the learned behavior throughout the whole organism. During the 1960s, several other researchers found that extracts from the brains of other animals, including insects, fish, and rats, could transfer learned behavior to untrained animals. In 2013, experimenters confirmed McConnell’s work, by demonstrating that after being decapitated, the regenerated flatworms retained their training.

These experiments have made it clear that experience is always modifying our being, and that our continuous processes of adaptation and development can’t be separated from our understanding of the world.

ray peat, 'Intention, Learning, and Health' (2021) x

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Our society has invented some institutions that powerfully negate our basic need to understand and to develop coherently. The professionalization of medicine, for example, has contributed to a weakening of the population’s ability to perceive its needs and to imagine appropriate solutions. Authoritarian attitudes throughout the culture create distrust of autonomous understanding and of independent choice of goals. “Science,” especially medical science, has become life’s greatest danger, when its goal has become the empowerment of “artificial intelligence,” centralizing control, institutionalizing the reductionist view of knowledge, and displacing actual intelligence.

ray peat, 'Intention, Learning, and Health' (2021) x

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The elimination of poverty and malnutrition can prevent many epidemics—poverty is a reservoir of infection. The study of vaccines, “vaccinology,” in isolation from the developmental effects of nutrition and environmental stress, is a pseudoscience, blind to the mechanisms that produce harmful long-range effects. A typical “vaccinology” curriculum includes a section on ways to overcome “vaccine hesitancy.” When education or research is financed by the drug industry, or their agents in government, it must be approached critically.

ray peat, 'Contexts for Vaccinations' (2020) x

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If all that matters is what exists on paper, such as bureaucrats believe, then I can legally impersonate my father, and use his identity, for financial and material gain, without lying, unless someone I was doing business with, or attempting to do business with, were to ask me my middle name, which I have never had happen. This is just one of the many holes in the current belief system of bureaucrats, a system you must believe in, in order to be employed in any type of role that requires bureaucratic work or oversight. A system I could not believe in without disabling the logic and other information filtering functions of my brain, which would require inducing brain damage, and would lead to chronic disease and a premature death of unnatural causes.

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I have given a name to my pain and call it ‘dog.’ It is just as faithful, just as obtrusive and shameless, just as entertaining, just as clever as any other dog.

nietzsche

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der mames shabosim

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"Most workers involved in Luddism, Chartism, Ricardian Socialism, and the various early strains of English radicalism would probably have agreed there was something divine in work, but that divine quality lay not in its effect on the soul and body—as laborers, they knew better than that—but that it was the source of wealth; everything that made rich and powerful people rich and powerful was, in fact, created by the efforts of the poor. Adam Smith and David Ricardo, the founders of British economic science, had embraced the labor theory of value—as did many of the new industrialists, since it allowed them to distinguish themselves from the landed gentry, whom they represented as mere idle consumers—but the theory was almost instantly taken up by Socialists and labor organizers and turned against the industrialists themselves. Before long economists began seeking for alternatives on explicitly political grounds. Already in 1832—that is, thirty-five years before the appearance of Marx’s Capital—we encounter warnings like the following: “That labor is the sole source of wealth seems to be a doctrine as dangerous as it is false, as it unhappily affords a handle to those who would represent all property as belonging to the working classes, and the share which is received by others as a robbery or fraud upon them.”

By the 1830s, many were, in fact, proclaiming exactly that. It is important to emphasize just how universally accepted the labor theory of value became in the generations immediately following the industrial revolution—even before the dissemination of Marx’s works, which gave such arguments a renewed energy and a more sophisticated theoretical language. It was particularly powerful in Britains American colonies. The mechanics and tradesmen who became the foot soldiers of the American War of Independence represented themselves as producers of the wealth that they saw the British crown as looting, and after the Revolution, many turned the same language against would-be capitalists. “The solid rock on which their idea of the good society rested, as one historian put it, “was that labor created all wealth.” The word “capitalist” at that time was largely a term of abuse. When US President Abraham Lincoln delivered his first annual message to Congress in 1861, for instance, he included the following lines, which, radical though they seem to a contemporary ear, where really just a reflection of the common sense of the time: “Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.”

...In 1880 a Protestant “home missionary” who had spent some years traveling along the Western frontier reported that: “You can hardly find a group of ranchmen or miners from Colorado to the Pacific who will not have on their tongue’s end the labor slang of Denis Kearney, the infidel ribaldry of [atheist pamphleteer] Robert Ingersoll, the Socialistic theories of Karl Marx.”

Certainly a detail left out of every cowboy movie I ever saw! (The notable exception being The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, which does indeed begin with a scene where John Huston, as a miner, explains the labor theory of value to Humphrey Bogart.)

...I turned to America for a reason. The United States plays a key role in our story. Nowhere was the principle that all wealth derives from labor more universally accepted as ordinary common sense, yet nowhere, too, was the counterattack against this common sense so calculated, so sustained, and so ultimately effective. By the early decades of the twentieth century, when the first cowboy movies were being made, this work was largely complete, and the idea that ranch hands had once been avid readers of Marx would have seemed as ridiculous as it would to most Americans today. Even more important, this counteroffensive laid the groundwork for the apparently bizarre attitudes toward work, largely emanating from North America, that we can still observe spreading across the world, with pernicious results.

...In the immediate wake of the Civil War all this began to change with the first stirrings of large-scale bureaucratic, corporate capitalism. The “Robber Barons,’ as the new tycoons came to be called, were at first met (as the name given them implies) with extraordinary hostility. But by the 1890s they embarked on an intellectual counteroffensive, proposing what Doukas and Durrenberger call, after an essay by Andrew Carnegie, a “Gospel of Wealth”:

"The fledgling corporate giants, their bankers, and their political allies objected to producerist moral claims and, starting in the 1890s, reached out with a new ideology that claimed, to the contrary, that capital, not labor, creates wealth and prosperity. Powerful coalitions of corporate interests made concerted efforts to transform the message of schools, universities, churches, and civic groups, claiming that “business had solved the fundamental ethical and political problems of industrial society.”

Steel magnate Andrew Carnegie was a leader of this cultural campaign. To the masses, Carnegie argued for what wed now call consumerism: the productivity of “concentrated” capital, under the wise stewardship of the fit, would so lower the price of commodities that the workers of tomorrow would live as well as the kings of the past. To the elite, he argued that coddling the poor with high wages was not good for “the race?“"

The promulgation of consumerism also coincided with the beginnings of the managerial revolution, which was, especially at first, largely an attack on popular knowledge. Where once hoopers and wainwrights and seamstresses saw themselves as heirs to a proud tradition, each with its secret knowledge, the new bureaucratically organized corporations and their “scientific management” sought as far as possible to literally turn workers into extensions of the machinery, their every move predetermined by someone else.

The real question to be asked here, it seems to me, is: Why was this campaign so successful? Because it cannot be denied that, within a generation, “producerism” had given way to “consumerism,” the “source of status,’ as Harry Braverman put it, was “no longer the ability to make things but simply the ability to purchase them,” and the labor theory of value—which had, meanwhile, been knocked out of economic theory by the “marginal revolution”—had so fallen away from popular common sense that nowadays, only graduate students or small circles of revolutionary Marxist theorists are likely to have heard of it. Nowadays, if one speaks of “wealth producers,’ people will automatically assume one is referring not to workers but to capitalists.

This was a monumental shift in popular consciousness. What made it possible? It seems to me that the main reason lies in a flaw in the original labor theory of value itself. This was its focus on “production”’—a concept which, as earlier noted, is basically theological, and bears in it a profound patriarchal bias. Even in the Middle Ages, the Christian God was seen as a craftsman and an artificer, and human work—which was always conceived primarily as male work—as a matter of making and building things, or perhaps coaxing them from the soil, while for women “labor” was seen primarily and emblematically as a matter of producing babies. Most real women’s labor disappeared from the conversation."

(Bullshit Jobs)

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The more I thought about the moral posturing of the Left,the more I saw that its genius lay not in reforms but in framing indictments. Resentment and retribution were the radical passions. In The Eighteenth Brumaire, Marx had invoked a dictum of Goethe’s devil: “Everything that exists deserves to perish.” It was the progressive credo. To the Left, neither honored traditions nor present institutions reflected human nature or desire; the past was only a dead weight to be removed from their path. When the Left called for “liberation,” what it really wanted was to erase the human slate and begin again in the year zero of creation.

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"If a man is easily content, then God is content for him as well and draws His hand of blessing from him."

Joseph and His Brothers

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For the first two decades of neoliberalism, the term was almost never used in the academy; instead, the new dispensation was discussed almost exclusively as the advent of a giddy new age of “postmodernism”—just one that, in retrospect, almost precisely reproduced the language and spirit of neoliberal “globalization” being presented in the media at the time. Almost all the emerging theoretical foci of the time—identity, creative consumption, flows and scapes, and so on—turned out to encode a kind of neoliberal cosmology in miniature. Even more, poststructural theory—particularly as enshrined in what might be termed the “vulgar Foucauldianism” that came to dominate so many ostensibly oppositional academic disciplines at the time—came to enshrine the particular class experiences of the professional-managerial class as universal truths: that is, a world of networks and networking, where games of power create social reality itself, all truth-claims are merely stratagems, and where mechanisms of physical coercion are made to seem irrelevant (even as they became ever more omnipresent) because all the real action is assumed to take place within techniques of self-discipline, forms of performance, and an endless variety of dispersed and decentered flows of influence. As a description of academic life, or for that matter professional life in general, such descriptions are often spot on. But it’s not what life is like for most people on earth and never has been. Indeed, the very fact that it was being posed not as a type of class experience but as a universal truth (in fact the only universal truth, since all others are denied) demonstrates just how wrong-headed the tendency, at this time, to dismiss older forms of ideology really was.

Now, how does anthropology fit into all of this? Well, in the 1980s, it did at first appear to be moving in the opposite direction to most disciplines, where “postmodernism” hovered somewhere between toothless mock radicalism, at worst, and a kind of pretentious and aggressively depoliticizing fin-de-siècle despair. In US anthropology, where the term really took off, “postmodernism” seemed anything but depoliticizing. Exponents of the reflexive moment proposed to dissect and challenge the political implications of ethnographic practice on every level, not even ruling out the possibility of rejecting the entire enterprise of anthropology as irredeemably compromised by its history as handmaiden to colonialism.

The postmodern challenge transformed anthropology—most of all, in teaching, where all introductory courses, or histories of the discipline, necessarily begin with a kind of ritual condemnation of anthropological theory and practice from the Victorian era through to at least the 1950s, and often well beyond. It came with all the trappings of radicalism. The very existence of the discipline was called into question. Yet the critique was never quite as radical as it seemed. First of all, one of the main practical effects it had was to blunt the political potential of anthropology—as the bearer of any kind of archive of social possibilities—by providing anyone outside the discipline, daunted by the very kaleidoscopic multiplicity it had documented of possible arrangements of political, economic, or domestic life, with a handy two- or three-line series of catchphrases allowing them to dismiss all forms of anthropological knowledge as inherently illegitimate. This was no doubt highly convenient for those who did not wish to consider themselves Eurocentric, but also did not wish to have to trouble themselves with learning much of anything about non-European perspectives on the world, but it had devastating effects on the ability of anthropologists to take part in a planetary conversation on human possibilities at precisely the moment, one might argue, that we were needed most.

Secondly, the critique of forms of power directed itself overwhelmingly at colonialism and its legacy, and much less—if at all—at economic structures of domination, corporate and financial power, bureaucracy, or structures of state coercion that were not directly related to it.

...At the risk of being slightly cartoonish, let me evoke a sketch of two different paradigms of academic authority. On the one hand, we have the patriarchal professor, a figure dominant for most of the twentieth century. A figure of absolute self-assurance, whether pedantic or playful, he is on a day-to-day level at least largely oblivious to the forms of privilege and exploitation that make his life possible, and as a result entirely at peace with himself owing to the existence of an institutional structure that guarantees him near-perfect life security. This is a caricature but, still, anyone who has spent much time in academia has encountered someone who fits the description, and there are still a handful, if rapidly decreasing in number, alive and in positions of authority even today. Nevertheless, such characters are no longer being produced. After all, this is precisely the figure whose privilege was so dramatically challenged in the campus turmoil of the 1960s and 1970s. In the neoliberal university, this challenge, combined with the dramatic marketization of academic life that began in the 1980s, has ultimately produced a very different sort of figure of authority. Let us imagine him too as a white male, since white males are, still, most likely to win the academic game—but one who, in the place of the self-assurance of the old patriarchal professor, combines a kind of constant nervous self-examination of his own privilege with a determination to nonetheless deploy all advantages—including that very privilege—in any way he can to prevail in an increasingly precarious academic environment; an environment demanding near-continual acts of reinvention and self-marketing.

...In fact, almost all the dominant theoretical trends within anthropology can only be understood in terms of the very context they themselves tend to efface. I have already given the example of what I’ve called vulgar Foucauldianism, which simultaneously developed the subjective experience of professional-managerial work arrangements as the basis for a universal principle of human sociality, and denied the central importance of either capitalism, or the threat of direct physical violence, at exactly the moment the threat of direct physical violence was becoming central to the operation of capitalism.

...Probably the most important thing I’ve learned from radical social movements, particularly those that have emerged from the engagement of anarchism, and other antiauthoritarian traditions, and radical feminism, is the notion of prefiguration. This is a very old idea—you already see it around 1900 in the Industrial Workers of the World’s call to “build a new society in the shell of the old”—but it has taken on a renewed power with the collapse of classical vanguardism: the widespread rejection of the idea of the stoic, humorless revolutionary whose purity can be judged by the degree to which they sacrifice all personal indulgences in the name of an absolute dedication to the cause, seen as a rational, calculated pursuit of power. There has been a general recognition that such a figure will never be able to produce a social order anyone would actually want to live in. Rather, prefigurative politics means making one’s means as far as possible identical with one’s ends, creating social relations and decision-making processes that at least approximate those that might exist in the kind of society we’d like to bring about. It is, as I’ve put it elsewhere, the defiant insistence on acting as if one is already free (Graeber 2004, 2013). Increasingly, this kind of defiant utopianism—an attendant refusal to operate through those institutional structures dominated by professional-managerial elites and their proceduralist ethic—has become the ground principle of democratic social movements, whether in Tunisia or Egypt, Greece, Spain, Occupy Wall Street, the Idle No More movement in Canada, or more recent outbreaks in Turkey, Bosnia, or Brazil. In fact, it’s everywhere. This is important, because it marks a real transformation in the idea of what a democratic movement would even mean.

What would it mean to apply this prefigurative principle to academic practice? Obviously it would not mean subordinating our passion for knowledge and understanding to the imperatives of activist strategy. It would challenge the very idea that there is, ultimately, any division here. It’s significant that just about every student occupation during the movement of 2010 began with a declaration that education is not an economic good, but a value in itself. But neither is it just a political good. A prefigurative approach, it seems to me, would most of all mean abandoning the nervous defensiveness of the hyperprofessionalized academic entrepreneur, and admitting to ourselves that what drew us to this line of work was mainly a sense of fun, that playing with ideas is a form of pleasure in itself, and that the deal we are tacitly being offered in the process of professionalization, that we must make a ritual sacrifice of everything that most gave us joy about the prospect of undertaking an intellectual life in order to have a chance of achieving even a modicum of life security, is itself violent and unnecessary. In retrospect, it’s hard not to see something deeply appealing about the easy self-confidence of that old patriarchal professor—and this, I note, coming from someone of nonelite class background who never had any chance of becoming that person under any circumstances. After all, in the final analysis, the problem with entitlement and privilege is not that some people have it, it’s that other people don’t. As any anthropologist who has had direct experience of an even moderately egalitarian society can attest, these are not, generally speaking, societies where everyone behaves like we expect a worker or a peasant to behave, but ones where everyone acts like an aristocrat. Call this, if you like, the utopian moment in intellectual practice. Whatever one choose to call it, it seems to me that any genuinely effective transformative practice would have to embrace that sense of confidence and pleasure in a form that would lead to a world where it would be available to absolutely everyone.