#capitalist individualism is a disease

[hussyknee]

DARVO: Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender.

An abuser denies the abuse ever took place, attacks the person that was abused (often the victim) for attempting to hold the abuser accountable for their actions, and claims that they are actually the victim in the situation, thus reversing what may be a reality of victim and offender. It often involves not just "playing the victim" but also victim blaming.

TL;Dr: Stop pathologizing neurodivergent people and individualizing abuse, and start treating abusers and bullies as a social failing that are products of privilege.

Unless you want to insist that every bitchass who's ever plagued marginalized people has NPD.

[transmutationisms]

serious question but do you personally believe there is a way to approach psychiatry in a way that uplifts and upholds patient autonomy and wellness or is the entire trade essentially fucked haha. Btw this is an ask coming from a 3rd year med student—with a background of severe mental illness—who is considering a residency in psychiatry after receiving life-saving care in high school pertaining to said conditions. (I have peers who have been involuntarily hospitalized and treated horribly in psych wards, with approaches i patently disagree with, but was lucky not to experience. I don’t like modern american medicine’s approach to mental illness; “throw pills” at it to “make it go away” ie. a problem of overprescribing, inadequate and non-holistic approach to mental health, and i feel a lot of that can be attributed to the capitalistic framework. I also def agree with you that so much of what can be considered normal human responses to traumatic events/normal human suffering can be unnecessarily pathologized—a great example being the whole “chemical imbalances in the brain is the ONLY reason why im like this” argument that ive unfortunately fallen hard for when i was younger and am still currently dismantling within myself…and like dont even get me started on this field’s history of demonizing POC, women, LGBT, etc). Like i deeply love my psych rotations so far, and i utterly feel in my gut that this is the manner in which i would like to help people—a lot of whom are just like me—but im wondering if there is a way to reconcile these aspects in a way that one can feel morally okay participating within such an imperfect system, in ur opinion… ngghhhhhh i just want to be a good doctor to my patients…

(ps i love all ur writing and analysis on succession!! big fan mwah <333)

i don't mean to sound unduly pissy at you, specifically, but i do have to say: every single time i've talked about antipsych or broader criticism of medicine on this website, i immediately get a wave of responses like this, from doctors/nurses/psychs/students of the above, asking me to, like, reassure them that they're not doing something immoral or un-communist or whatever by having or pursuing these jobs. and it's honestly frustrating. why is it that these conversations get re-framed around this particular line of inquiry and medical ego-soothing? why is it that when i say "the medical encounter is not structured to protect patient autonomy or well-being," so many people hear something more along the lines of "doctors are mean and i wish they were nicer"? why is it that it's impossible to discuss the philosophical and structural violence of academic and clinical medicine without it becoming a referendum on the individual morality of doctors?

i'm choosing to read you in good faith because i think it's possible to re-re-frame this line of questioning to demonstrate to you the sorts of critiques and inquiries i find more interesting and more conducive to patient autonomy and liberation. so, let me pick apart a few lines of this ask.

"is the entire trade essentially fucked?"

if you're thinking of trying to 'reform' the project of medical psychology within existing infrastructures and institutions, then yeah, it's fucked. if you're still assuming that affective distress can only be 'treated' within this medical apparatus (despite, again, no psychiatric dx satisfying any pathologist's understanding of a 'disease' ie an aberration from 'normal' physiological functioning) then you're not challenging the things that actually make psychiatry violent. you're simply fantasising about making the violence nicer.

"I don’t like modern american medicine’s approach to mental illness; “throw pills” at it to “make it go away” ie. a problem of overprescribing, inadequate and non-holistic approach to mental health, and i feel a lot of that can be attributed to the capitalistic framework."

i hate when i talk about psychotropic drugs being marketed to patients using lies like the chemical imbalance myth, and then pushed on patients—including through outright force—by psychiatrists, and the discussion gets re-framed as one about 'overprescribing'. my problem is not with people taking drugs. i am, in fact, so pro-drugs that i think even the ones administered in a clinical setting sometimes have value. my issue is with, again, the provision of misleading or outright false information, the use of force and coercion to put patients on such drugs in order to force social conformity and employability, and the general model of medicine and medical psychology that assumes patients ought to be passive recipients of medical enlightenment rather than active participants in their own treatment who are given the agency to decide when and how to engage with any form of curative or meliorative intervention.

'holistic' medicine and psychiatry do not solve this problem! they are not a paradigm shift because they continue to locate expertise and epistemological authority with the credentialed physician, and to position patients as too sick, stupid, or helpless to do anything but receive and comply with the medical interventions. there are certainly psychotropic drugs that are demonstrably more harmful than others (antipsychotics, for example), and some that are demonstrably prescribed to patients who do not benefit from them and are even harmed by them. conversely, there are certainly forms of intervention besides pharmaceuticals that people may find helpful. but my general critique here is aimed less at haggling over specific methods of intervention, and more at the ideological and philosophical tenets of medicine that cause any interventions to be imposed by force or coercion on patients, then framed as being 'for their own good'. were suffering people given the information and autonomy to actually choose whether and how to engage in any kind of intervention, some might still choose drugs! my position here is not one of moralising drugs, but making the act of taking them one that is freely chosen and available as an option without relying on physician determination of a patient's interests over their own assessment of their needs and wants.

"so much of what can be considered normal human responses to traumatic events/normal human suffering can be unnecessarily pathologized"

true, but don't misunderstand me as saying that drugs or any other form of intervention should be forcibly withheld from those who do want them and are made fully aware of what risks and harms seeking them could entail. again, this would still be an authoritarian model; my critique is aimed at increasing patient autonomy, not at creating equally authoritarian and empowered doctors who just have slightly different treatment philosophies.

"dont even get me started on this field’s history of demonizing POC, women, LGBT, etc"

ok, framing this as "demonisation" tells me that you're not understanding that, again, this is a systemic and structural critique. it is certainly true that a great many doctors currently are, and have historically have been, outright racist, trans/misogynist, ableist, and so on. framing this as a problem of a well-intentioned discipline being corrupted by some assholes is getting it backwards. medicine attracts prejudiced people, not to mention strengthens and promotes these prejudices in its entire training and practice infrastructures, because of its underlying philosophical orientation toward enforcing 'normality' as defined by 18th-century statistics and 19th-century human sciences that explicitly place white, cis, able-bodied european men as the normal ideal that everyone else is inferior to or failing to live up to. doctors who really nicely tell you that you're too fat are still using bmi charts that come from the statistical anthropometry of adolphe quételet and the flawed actuarial calculations of metlife insurance. doctors who really nicely deny you access to transition surgery are still operating under a paradigm that gives the practitioner authority over expressions and embodiments of gender. the issue isn't 'demonisation', it's that medicine and psychiatry explicitly attempt to render judgments about who and what is 'normal' and therefore socially 'healthy', and enforce those standards on patients. this is not a promotion of patient well-being, but of social conformity.

"i deeply love my psych rotations so far, and i utterly feel in my gut that this is the manner in which i would like to help people"

let me ask you a few questions. you say that you like your psych rotations... but how do your patients feel about them? is their autonomy protected? are they in treatment by free choice, and free to leave any time they wish? are they treated as human beings with full self-determination? if you witnessed a situation in which a patient was coerced or forced into a certain treatment, or in which you were not sure whether they were consenting with full knowledge or freedom, would you feel empowered to intervene? or would doing so threaten your career by exposing you to anger and retaliation from your higher-ups? what higher-ups will you be exposed to as a resident, and then as a practicing physician? could you practice in a way that committed fully, 100%, to patient autonomy if you were working at someone else's practice, or in a hospital or clinic? could you, according to current medical guidelines, even if you had your own practice?

when you say "this is the manner in which i would like to help people", what do you mean by "this"? can you define your philosophy of treatment, and the relationship and power dynamic you want to have with any future patients? is it one in which you hold authority over them and see yourself as determining what's in their 'best interests', even over their own expressed wishes? have you connected with patient advocates, psych survivors (other than your friends), and radical psychiatrists and anti-psychiatrists who may espouse heterodox treatment philosophies that you could consider? do you think such philosophies are sufficient for protecting patient autonomy and well-being, or are they still models that position the physician's judgment and authority over that of the patient?

"im wondering if there is a way to reconcile these aspects in a way that one can feel morally okay participating within such an imperfect system"

and here is the crux of the problem with this entire ask. you are wondering how to sleep at night, if you are participating in a career you find morally distasteful. where, though, do your patients enter into that equation? do you worry about how they sleep at night, after having interacted with a system of social violence that may very well have traumatised them under the guise of providing help? why does your own guilty conscience worry you more than violations of your patients' bodies, minds, and basic self-determination?

i can't tell you whether your career path is morally acceptable to you. i don't think this type of guilt or self-flagellation is fruitful and i don't think it helps protect patients. i don't, frankly, have a handy roadmap sitting around for creating a new system of medicine and health care that rests on patient autonomy. affective distress is real, and is not something we should have to bear alone or with the risk of having violence inflicted upon us. what you need to ask yourself is: how does the medical model and establishment serve people experiencing such distress? how does it perpetuate violence against them? and how do you see yourself countering, or perpetuating, such violence as someone operating within this discipline? what would it mean to be a 'good' actor within a violent system, if you do indeed believe that such a thing is ontologically possible?

[mercifullymad]

In capitalist political economies, illness is seen as a drag on productivity. Frequent or prolonged illness is often seen as disqualifying or devaluing an individual's labor power. There is a rush to be over with ill health and get back to work as quickly as possible. Rest is scarce, and all treatment under health-capitalism is rationed along class lines. The ways we encounter medicine reflect this dynamic: care is designed around billable encounters, acute care is the most easily accessible, and our cultural imaginary frames disease as something which is episodic. The provisioning of medical care and the social determinants of health have been based on a system of triage that attempts to devote maximum care resources to those most able to contribute productively to the economy.

Health Communism by Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant

[txttletale]

So I'm a leftist because I can plainly see that capitalism sucks, but I have a really hard time pinning down what I think we should replace it with because I have "agrees with the last theory I read" disease. (Or, more embarrassingly, "agrees with the last Post I read.")

Something I've been wondering about recently is what's the point of planning and arguing over what happens after the revolution anyway? The chances of a successful worker's revolution in my lifetime, let alone the next few decades, feels vanishingly small. The preconditions just feel so far away.

Is there really value in committing to a specific ideology right now, or is it sufficient to say the anarchist future and the ML future (and even, like, the DemSoc future) sound better than what we have now, and require many of the same preconditions, so let's work towards those shared goals now and figure out what comes after in a few decades when the groundwork is actually laid?

i agree with you that i don't think a genuine revolutionary situation will arise (at least, not in the imperial core) within our lifetimes. i also agree that there is a meaningful degree to which the theoretical differences between marxist-leninists & anarchists are far enough from being present and pressing concerns that they should in almost all cases be working together and employing similar tactics and action.

however, i do think there is a value to having an ideological framework: it keeps you consistent. if your ideology is vague and empty, you're liable to (intentional or unintentional) opportunism--you will fill in the gaps or approach new ideas with the default positions, the ones that require the least divergence from hegemonic cultural norms and values.

that sounds a bit ideological-jargony so i'll phrase it another way: if you grow up in a [joker voice] society, you're going to grow up with a lot of assumptions! like, 'cops reduce crime', for example. and if you don't have an underlying theory of capitalist society and how it functions, then it's entirely possible to realize (through experience or analysis) that capitalism is bad and that our society is inherently unjust, but continue thinking 'cops reduce crime' because that's just the default cultural position you grew up with. these two things are pretty impossible to reconcile, right--because of course the actual purpose of cops is to enforce private property rights and maintain the capitalist system of economic relations--but if you don't have a full theoretical framework of capitalism & society that you can use to analyse things, that incoherence is very easy to let slip by!

i also want to say that while i think that anarchists & marxist-leninists (and all other revolutionary) communists share common goals and functionally very similar political projects for our forseeable lifetime, there is a meaningful difference between these two and the 'demsocs' you mentioned. not an uncrossable gulf by any means in terms of working together and forging political alliances--but the steps one takes to agitate and organize the working class in anticipation of a future revolutionary situation, however distant, are imo very functionally different to the steps one takes to advocate for social reform within liberal legislatures. rosa luxemburg put it well when she said there is nothing reformist about supporting trade unions, welfare legislation, as a vehicle for revolutionary class struggle--but when you take these things as ends themselves, i.e., as viable methods for resolving the contradictions of capitalism, you become unable to use them as such a vehicle.

but, yeah. tldr; i think it is far from the most important thing (the most important thing is to be a principled anti-capitalist & anti-imperialist--these are the two litmus tests for whom i can consider a political ally), but it is useful to have an underlying political framework rather than a collection of individual positions, because the latter can lead to contradictory and self-defeating worldviews and political programs

[croziers-compass]

Summary Notes of Terror Camp 2023 (9.12.23)

(A small summary of notes and references I took during Terror Camp Day One)

Erasure of Sailors of Colour in Arctic Exploration!!! Needs to be explored much more. JEAMS Fitz-James Fitzjames - w'ont put his apostrophes in the back of words. Capitalising Letters where you would Not usually capitalise them is like Italics. it is Emphasis in speech when written.

These jokes are getting Auld. (If you know you know)

Most things were phonetically written.

WOAHOO!!! - James Thompson

Relic? Or Artefact?

Semiophore - Objects regarded in a given community as carries of meaning.

Walpole is a little fucked in opinion. (imo)

Dundy was awful at spelling. Worse than Goodsir.

Capitalists should really look into Thomas Holloway

Everyone knows and loves Snarfin' On Them Ribs Saturday Man Proposes, God Disposes

Lady Jane was offended.

Hudson Bay Speedrun - Let Curiosity be your Compass

James Knight does not girlboss but he thinks he does.

A Ship Called The Whalebone Roald was both an asshole but good at what he did.

The Raft of the Medusa - We knew where that was going.

Johnathan Miles is a Horse Girl

Foreshadowing of the Cannibalism and Mutiny

HOOSH

History is a Panopticon They were just people... (Also a Note. I am worried that a lot of the fandom thinks that the concept of a Panopticon originates from TMA and that it was a TMA reference. It was not. I am wondering now if the TMA listeners know who Jeremy Bentham is.)

Cultural Understandings

IceBound Not Down - I did not take a lot of notes on Professor Hester Blum's panel. I was far too invested to write and when it was over I realised I had not made any notes. She was incredible. I loved her narratives very much. I would love to get her book. It is on my list! You would have had to have been there. It was wonderful. Not News: Dan Simmons is a wee fuckboy. We have established this a lot. He also establishes this for us. (?) Umlaqtalik - There is a boat there.

Imperialism is a disease.

How to read Ethically!

Some of my Notes from the Panel with Paul Ready and Nive Nielsen:

"You can hear a smile in a recording" - Nive Nielsen

Paul "I am not an expert on Anything" Ready

He is so very attached to Goodsir. Goodsir is very much a part of him. Hearing him talk about how integrated Goodsir is to himself was wonderful.

"I think we need more Goodsirs in the world."

Nive and her impressive education on the importance of indigenous representation and how that impacted her. How her voice as not only an actor but an Indigenous Actor was taken with such respect and was given the space to allow for respectful and creative extrapolation on the Set.

A small Note in my book that says: Oh goodness me he is hideously beautiful. I cannot stand how beautiful he really is. Oh my goodness.

"Nothing is good or bad. Just the potential to be." - Nive Nielsen - Terror Camp 2023

Nive: All Humans are good at picking up sincerity.

Goodsir would have hated Hickey.

"Ah. Would you look at that. Dead with my ass carved up." - Paul Ready

Nive: You cannot kill people or let people die because everything is connected and you do not know how that will effect your future. You have to depend on each other. So when there was conflict you had to solve it with as little violence as possible.

A very Important Book Nive Nielsen had spoken about!

You can get a copy on Thriftbooks of "Give Me My Father's Body" by Kenn Harper Here

I had an incredible amount of fun during this event. I am so excited for tomorrow. What notes you are seeing here are just references to part of the panels and some side comments I had made between all of my other more detailed notes. There was so much to be had and so much that we saw and heard. The speakers were incredible and each individual was incredibly dedicated to their impressive Art and Passion. It truly showed. As Nive said: You can hear a smile in a recording". I feel as if this applies to every one of the speakers and all of the panels we had the pleasure to enjoy today.

I have more detailed notes in my journal which, of course, you can see I scrawled a lot in. I had amassed about seven whole pages worth in that time. So to type them all would be just simple a task I cannot do. But I am open to discussions regarding how everything was if you did not get to attend it! Also Terror Camp has a wonderful setup available for you to explore the other avenues that they have presented on their website. So please do go check that you if you are interested! I cannot wait to do this tomorrow with my fellow Shipmates. Thank you so much for everyone that put together @terrorcamp. I am quite excited for tomorrow!

With much love and saltwater kisses,

Second Leftenant in heart and spirit,

-Wilbur E. F. C.

[acheronist]

I am reading The Goldfinch. I'm where he just started hanging out at the furniture/antiques place regularly. It's written well, it's holding my inerest, but I don't yet see what all the fuss is about. So not as a criticism but in an effort to appreciate something I might be missing, why is it a book you love?

well.

donna tartt is one of my favorite authors anyways. I think she's a spectacular freak and her storytelling skills are exceptionally good and i've read as much of her work as i can possibly get my little hands on!

but for tgf specifically, the narrative being soooo so so centered on personal emphasis & meaning being bestowed upon specific artworks despite them being very unpersonal objects (after they get out of the artist's hands, that is,) in stark comparison to the way that art that can belong to/be seen/be consumed any random fucking person alive in the modern age has been the only existential buoy in my life for a very very very long time. in my lowest times, instead of killing myself i go stand in art museums and think about how much love and creativity is innate in humanity despite times of crisis and war and disease and all of the fucking agonies and everything going wrong and having no control over it. ha ha. it's always been a balm to me, to remember that there is goodness and love preserved in artwork, and that artwork is tougher and longer-lasting than you'd initially think, and that it's always there waiting for me to come back to it and see it in a different emotional state to find new meanings in it. this is the same as how theo thinks about the painting thru different times in his life!! going from needing it desperately as a connection to his mom, obsessively as a comfort, and then reviling it for being a representation of his life's biggest trauma and yet still tending to it and caring for it, to the heartache of losing it and the relief of retrieving it with the one person who genuinely loves him as an act of devotion and apology for a previous betrayal....all while navigating how systems in power are neglectful and uncaring and capitalistic. it's all just So Much To Me.....

and I know the middle chapters where theo just goes on and on about the intricacies of antique forgery aren't as fun and sexy as the vegas chapters with boris (underage drug abuse and gay sex WHEEEEEE) OR the actual criminal chapters at the end (mysterious borderline-noir criminal heist slash subtextual romcom), but they're soooo so poignant to me. because in my own little life, curating the art and music around me and finding beauty and importance and symbolism in these subtle things is a vital central axis that i need to have, much like i need a nice bed or a good meal or a glass of clean water. much of how i cope and navigate the world is very deeply focused around art & art analysis, and I think the only other book i've read that articulated that sort of feeling quite as eloquently would be john berger's way of seeing, which is an academic and analytical text. but i just love fiction so much, so to have tgf as the extremely emotional fiction option to go along w my nonfiction art thesis books that are tonally very prim and objective and well organized..... DELICIOUS. i love it. and i love a fictive narrative built upon tragedy. i love works that call back to each other in conversation, and stories that cannot exist without the foundation of Something Else Existing A Millennia Prior. i love comparing works and establishing what makes them similar or different but how they approach the same themes. and i love to see characters (THEO. boris. pippa. hobie. andy.) that i can identify with who struggle with similiar problems i have, because it makes it easier for me to get thru my own life. this isn't groundbreaking reasoning though, that's just how every human alive consumes art and content. of course we look for ourselves in fiction. of course we as individuals want to find things that we relate to.

and also in a purely self-indulgence way, I also looooooove it when media is unbearably long and i can get completely entranced and study it closely and always be able to find new details that throw the whole story into a completely new light, which I think tgf does very well because it's almost 900 pages LMAO. every time i reread it there's a new nuanced angle for me to think about actions and thoughts leading into consequences and i just eat that up every single time.......

but despite all of this i do recognize that tgf is not everyone's cup of tea. like it's genuinely one of the most meaningful texts in my heart but i completely understand how it can be long, and boring, and melodramatic, and a bit insane, and convoluted, and pompous, and not worth the time to get from cover to cover.

but it is worth the time. to me.

[miss-mania]

In the early days of COVID, before any infections reached the US or Australia, I was telling everyone I could that based on the available data at the time that the situation was going to be absolutely disastrous. That unless something were done and severe measures taken quickly it would be too late to prevent an unfathomable amount of death and illness, but that I did not believe that the western capitalist paradigm would allow for such a response.

One of the things I would tell the people I know is that within a few years many people's lives would be divided into two periods; before the pandemic began and after. I even UNDERESTIMATED the number of deaths there have been thus far. I also would tell people the preventative measures that could be taken place, absorbed every new piece of information I could about COVID, and the most effective measures recommended by researchers to disinfect surfaces and prevent infection and spread of the disease.

A lot of people thought I was being a doomer. I was just being realistic, and the people who I told tend then to take these warnings more seriously now but plenty of people seem to be in denial regarding the severity of the damage COVID did and the threat it continues to pose because they were in the privileged position of not being personally too affected by it, and frankly some are so utterly fixed in the mindset capitalism has burned into the the very core of their being from birth that they actually cannot imagine how the global response could have been better and how the worst of it could have been avoided.

What I'm getting at is this: while we continue to be impacted by COVID both in terms of new infections and long-term health effects, we are staring down the barrel of another global pandemic. H5N1 has been around for a long time but in the last several months it has displayed a marked increase in pathogenicity and lethality in multiple mammalian species ranging from cows to penguins to seals and more in unprecedented levels. It is not a matter of if this virus will evolve and recombine in a way that will trigger a pandemic that makes COVID seem like a picnic, under the death cult of capital it is a matter of when. It is a matter of time.

Our governments will continue to do exactly what they have done under COVID; take the minimal precautions and delayed measures necessary only to keep the gears turning, while the sacrifice of the underpaid "essential worker" and the culling of the vulnerable continues, normalized and unabated.

I have no solutions to this particular parts of the problem and frankly I'm probably not knowledgeable or articulate enough that I should even be making this post. I do however believe that we should personally do whatever we can to prepare and protect the people around us. Get PPE and prep in advance, over time so as to not strain the supply when things escalate. Be mindful of washing your hands and being hygienic. Don't be around other people if you know you're sick or have been exposed. Mask up in public spaces. This is the bare minimum in terms of personal responsibility.

But I also believe that under a system so utterly corrupt and reprehensible that it considers millions of deaths to be merely the price to pay to continue with business as usual, which deems inconsequential the lives of those who for various reasons can't or won't devote themselves to it and extol its virtues, and which facilitates the growth of ideologies that venerate cruelty and exalt puerile displays of individualism above the safety of the whole, that it is an absolute moral imperative to rebel and live as much of your life divorced from that system as you possibly can.

Hang on to each other <3

[theculturedmarxist]

I think what artists, musicians, writers, pretty much every creative person really, all need to understand is that under capitalism, everything they make is worthless. AI, piracy, whatever, they're all just windmills you're tilting at. Even if by some miracle you did manage to defeat it, it would soon be replaced by some other terrible mechanism which alienates you from your creation, because that's how Capitalism works.

This is just the latest iteration of a process that's been happening for over 500 years now. It's just now instead of enclosing a physical commons for the private profit of aristocrats, oligarchs are enclosing the digital commons. Consolidating the public spaces of forums, message boards, webrings, and other democratically driven online spaces into the few mega-sites of Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, and so on has run its course. Now the capitalists have turned to trawling the rest of the internet to try and wring whatever value they can get from it.

And just like the process of enclosure or mechanization or industrialization, there's no putting that genie back in the bottle. They've already scoured the internet for untold trillions of pages of data and images and what not. The damage is done. It doesn't matter what further damage is going to come from it either, because the dirty not-so-secret of the tech world is that this is it. They have no more bright ideas. Pretty much every great thing to Google's name, they bought. All their in house initiatives failed. Google video? Google groups? Google glass? They make their money selling ads that nobody cares about. Same with Facebook. They just spent billions to create a crappy Second Life clone that no one gives a fuck about. These tech corporations are massive, lumbering, doomed empires, especially now that covid has pretty much brought the era of 0%-interest loans to an end. Without the billions of dollars of venture capital being pumped into Uber and Twitter and all the rest, now they've got to actually start making money, which none of them are actually able to do. Now they're desperate for some new gimmick to latch onto to try and turn a profit or attract ever dwindling venture capital. Bitcoin was the last big scam. Remember Libra? NFTs were the big thing after that. NFT images! NFT tv shows! NFT games! Here we are a year later and no one fucking talks about them any more. AI is just more of this magic bean bullshit.

Aside from all of that, even if AI was managed to be beaten back, you can assume that whatever the cure the powers that be settle on will be worse than the disease. Whatever "protections" get put into place will only be used against individual artists. At the end of the day, these big corps are just going to end up keeping all the information they've already stolen, the algorithms they used to steal it, and then will put laws into place legitimizing that theft after the fact. You're simply not going to win that fight, because the battle's already been lost.

The only long term solution to this is to attack the root cause, which is a system that relies upon exploitation in order to accumulate profit. Profits are what feed these massive corporate beasts, and as they're starved by falling profits, they'll only grow more ravenous and rapacious. We're only at the opening stages of this trend now, and things are only going to get worse.

[rivercelt]

Not just a useless degree: the importance of the humanities and social sciences

I am Caitlin Sovana McGregor, a student of the Humanities. I am a third year Philosophy and History student at one of the best universities in Africa. In previous years, I have also taken English Literature, Politics, International Relations, and Sociology. As you have probably deduced by my subject choices, I am extremely passionate about the field of Humanities. I believe that it is the single most important, yet sadly overlooked sphere of academia, and even life in general. 

This is what I will be dedicating my entire page to. It pains me to see how neglected and mocked my field is, and I plan to educate as many people as possible on the importance and growing relevance of the social sciences and humanities.

For those of you who don’t know, the humanities is a field of study that, according to Encyclopædia Britannica, is concerned with humans, societies, cultures, and their thinking, values, knowledge, evolution, creations, and histories. To put it more simply, the field studies, well, humanity. Some disciplines within the humanities are: history, art, literature, philosophy, sociology, politics, anthropology, psychology, etc. Even disciplines such as law and economics fall within the scope of the humanities and social sciences. 

Unfortunately, with the rise of anti-intellectualism, and the capitalistic desire to do everything only in pursuit of profit, the humanities and social sciences have been very lowly regarded as a field of study. You might have heard STEM, finance, or business students say things like “what job can you even do with a degree in the humanities?”, or “what are you going to do with a Bachelor of Arts, work at McDonald’s?”, or my personal favourite, “can’t you just Google the things you learn in your degree?”. 

I strongly and fully believe that the humanities and social sciences are just as, if not more important than any other fields of study. Engineers design the physical aspects of the world for us to live in it more efficiently, medical doctors provide the solutions and preventions to injuries, diseases, and illnesses that would threaten our personal and collective development, lawmakers and lawyers design and maintain the structural aspects of society, scientists provide breakthroughs that could alter ways of life for the better, information technicians and technologists innovate and create methods for better communication and access to information. These are all important careers and aspects of life, but what do they all have in common? What is the golden thread tying all these very important spheres together? Humanity. Humans. Society. The very existence of people is both why and how these fields of study exist in the first place. Society is at the core of our human experience. So why wouldn’t the study thereof be important?

We need political and sociological thinkers to help us understand the complex powers and structures that shape society and our individual lives, the impacts of the relationships between individuals, groups, and institutions, and the extent to which change is possible on these levels. We need historians to analyse the structures, systems, individuals, and societies of the past in order to understand the social, political, and economic environments we are faced with today, and prevent the cycles of oppression from repeating themselves. This field is especially important in a country like mine, where cycles of oppression have repeated themselves over and over (colonisation and the brutality towards indigenous South Africans, followed by cruelty by the British towards Afrikaners, which later resulted in the oppression of non-Afrikaner South Africans by Afrikaner nationalists in the form of apartheid, followed by a long and complex continuation of oppression, even after the end of the regime). We need literary thinkers to explore the human pattern of storytelling, and how this practice can sometimes reveal more about humanity than a purely factual and explicit account of things. We need anthropologists to guide us through the evolution of societies and cultures, so that we may celebrate diversity and respect and understand our differences and similarities. We need philosophers to question literally everything, to relentlessly seek answers and knowledge, to study knowledge and the nature of reality itself, to teach us how to think critically, and to create a world of new minds that may begin to unravel and dismantle the rigidity of conservative thinking, one debate at a time.

Not surprisingly, most people who hold the humanities in disdain have fallen into the capitalist trap of seeking a return on investment after their studies. People like this fail to recognise that a return on investment doesn’t always have to come in monetary form. Personally, I do not plan to live a lavish life after becoming a teacher, professor, or researcher in my department. And the greatest return on investment for me, would be to know that my work, which I have dedicated my life to, has had an impact on society, no matter how great or small. A return on investment for me would be knowing that, at the end of the day, I have imparted my knowledge onto a younger generation of our country, and that I’ve helped mould them into citizens who understand the complexities of life, and who can think critically, and understand themselves and each other. A return on investment for me would be knowing that I have encouraged someone to speak up about the injustices they see, and that under my tutorship, they are able to view these issues on a level deeper than most. A return on investment for me would be to see more and more students fall in love with the pursuit of knowledge. After all, the pursuit of knowledge is the only thing worth living for.

[1863-project]

I just had a truly fascinating experience at work today.

We had a morning staff training regarding conflict deescalation. I was nervous, because the presenter informed us that at the end of the training there was going to be an exercise in which she was going to divide us up into groups and make us fight. I got anxious and worried it was going to bring up past trauma for me, but instead it was entirely different than what I expected and I learned something really interesting about how I interpret conflicts compared to my more neurotypical colleagues.

The presenter divided the room into two groups and presented what is known as the Ugli Orange Case, written originally in the 1980s. Each side of the room is given a specific set of information regarding these fictitious oranges. One side is playing a scientist at a pharmaceutical firm that has created a method of neutralizing gas from an old WWII bioweapon in the Pacific that will potentially disable and kill people if it goes off; time is of the essence. The other side is playing a scientist at a different pharmaceutical firm that has an inoculation that prevents a rare disease in newborns if their pregnant mothers receive the vaccination; again, time is crucial, as there’s an outbreak happening. These firms do not like each other, and there has been corporate espionage between them in the past.

Both of their solutions require a very rare fruit, the so-called Ugli Orange. There were 4000 grown in that year, and a seller in South America has 3000 of them. The negotiating scientists’ task is to compromise with each other despite the obvious distrust between the two firms. It’s an exercise in conflict resolution and communication - and, incidentally, reading comprehension, because they force both groups to read the case information very quickly.

What they don’t tell the negotiating groups is that the two scientists and their firms actually need different parts of the orange - the rind and the juice, respectively - and can share, and part of the exercise is about seeing if one of the negotiators will mention what is specifically needed so the other one realizes they need something different. Usually this does not happen.

My colleagues at the library interpreted this as a problem with interpersonal communication (and not being given enough time to really absorb the case details). I interpreted it a little differently - I saw it as a fatal flaw of capitalism. Capitalism inherently fosters a sense of competition instead of cooperation and actively produces these unhealthy situations in the name of profit - ultimately, this is two companies competing, and although they’re both trying to do something for the greater good, their prior competition has made it difficult for them to communicate effectively and share information for collaborative purposes. This would not have been an issue if they hadn’t been trying to outdo each other for profit in the first place.

I am really, really interested in the fact that I took a big picture approach and my co-workers didn’t. I saw the case as a symptom of a bigger problem, whilst they were able to approach it as an individual conflict. In a capitalist society, we are inherently forced to compete against one another for resources in the name of “success,” and I wonder if my status as a disabled person (autistic) is what shifted my viewpoint on this issue and is why I took away something different from it than my co-workers did.

(Either that, or it’s because my views tend to be pretty anarcho-socialist a lot of the time. But anyway.)

If anything, I think that this is a great example of how our own personal experiences can shape how we approach problems and what we see in them. My neurotypical co-workers saw a miscommunication caused by legitimate trust issues. I saw the situation as a symptom of a bigger problem, a system that actively encourages this unhealthy competition and is willing to sacrifice people’s lives in the name of profit, because as a disabled person that system has directly harmed me, as well as my friends. Everyone is going to interpret things differently due to their life experiences and personal beliefs.

[haggishlyhagging]

Farsighted thinkers have pointed out that the moral imperative of respect for life, formerly understood in quantitative terms, must now be understood in terms of the quality of life. This has obvious implications, such as the need for population control and for bringing a halt to the waste of resources and pollution of the environment. Such needs are not understood by the machismo mind. Marcuse uses the category of obscenity to describe the behavior of the "affluent monster." He points out that "this society is obscene in producing and indecently exposing a stifling abundance of wares while depriving its victims abroad of the necessities of life . . . in its prayers, in its ignorance, and in the wisdom of its kept intellectuals." Meanwhile, of course, the affluent society pretends to be improving the quality of life, disguising what is actually happening by its usual techniques, which I have called "reversal."

Marcuse observes that the Establishment abuses the term "obscenity" by applying it, not to expressions of its own immorality but to the behavior of another:

Obscene is not the picture of a naked woman who exposes her pubic hair but that of a fully clad general who exposes his medals rewarded in a war of aggression; obscene is not the ritual of the Hippies but the declaration of a high dignitary of the Church that war is necessary for peace.

Marcuse's perception is acute, and he rightly calls for "linguistic therapy" which would free words from almost total distortion of their meanings by "the Establishment." Yet I must point out that the therapy will never be radical enough if the basic obscenity is perceived as capitalism rather than sexism. The very word "obscene" itself, as used by "the Establishment," suggests the locus of the essential perversion and victimization. Marcuse's own insightful juxtaposition of the naked woman and the fully clad general reveals the basic reversal in phallic morality which is still observable in socialist as well as capitalist societies. Such social criticism does not go far enough. It employs revealing instances of the powerful elite's sexist behavioral, imaginative, and linguistic distortions while still perceiving these distortions' radical source in capitalism and their cure in socialism.

Another sentence from the same essay of Marcuse is symptomatic of this phenomenon of shortsightedness. He writes:

Thus we are faced with the contradiction that the liberalization of sexuality provided an instinctual basis for the repressive and aggressive power of the affluent society [emphasis mine].

It should be stressed and this is what feminism is doing—that the so-called liberalization of sexuality "provides an instinctual basis for the repressive and aggressive power" of the sexist society. For of course it is not a genuine liberation of sexuality that displaces the obscenity of generals and projects it upon naked women, and the essential disease is not affluence in itself. The lifting of taboos on genital sexuality does nothing to liberate from sex roles. Marcuse himself says that this relaxation binds "the 'free' individuals libidinally to the institutionalized fathers."

Such expressions of insight into the sexist nature of the oppressive society, strangely coupled with failure to direct the critique directly and essentially at sexual oppression, is characteristic not only of intellectuals such as Marcuse but also of more "popular" expressions of social criticism. Such films as The Godfather, The Ruling Class, and Deliverance can be seen as brilliant exposes of the social disease which is patriarchalism. One could almost believe that the writers and directors must be committed feminists. Yet the functioning of these productions, with their amazingly revelatory juxtapositions of sex and violence and their exploitation of phallic symbolism, has not been directed intentionally to the service of feminism. Perhaps one could call such "understanding" of sexual alienation "subintentional." Recognition of the real enemy's identity is so close to the surface of consciousness of the writers and directors of such productions that some feminists tend to find the experience of reading such books and watching such films almost unbearable. "They know not what they say," it would seem. Then it is clear that women will have to speak forth the identity of that which is destroying us all. The subintentional revelations of male critics indicate that some receptivity to this knowledge may be possible—that the capacity to hear is closer to consciousness than we would have expected. The time for us to speak is precisely now.

-Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation

[transmutationisms]

(Very genuine question) how do you handle breaking down the “chemical imbalance that needs to be treated” framework when so many people cling to that framework to reassure themselves that it isn’t their fault. I have been reading on psychiatry and I would like to feel more comfortable bringing it up and pushing back when I hear harmful rhetoric but worry about doing more harm than good due to my in-eloquence and explaining things badly

great question and honestly, this is something i want to improve on in my own communication. it's part of a wider and very pernicious lie that functions to defend both medical practitioners' professional positions and the capitalist status quo by re-locating all suffering to the realm of the individual pathology and presenting pathologisation and medicalisation as not only liberating, but the only possible path to validation & care. there's no room here for a contextualisation of suffering or a critique of the social conditions that bring it about; it's also a lie that fails patients over and over again because, for the many who don't respond adequately to whatever the approved biomedical treatment is, the pathologise-and-treat model can only respond that they must be doing something wrong. with the 'chemical imbalance' conception of depression, for example, so many patients who then don't feel better on SSRIs come to believe their brains must be uniquely 'broken' and that they are simply neurologically doomed to feel like this forever. this is, for the psychiatrist and the state, preferable to having depressed people who are accustomed to viewing their suffering as in any way social, environmental, or collective!

anyway, like i said this is something i also want to work on so i don't know that i have a cheat code here. i try to emphasise throughout any discussions on such a topic that i'm offering a third way forward: not "this is biological so it's not your fault" but also not "this isn't biological so you can fix it". it's a completely different paradigm for understanding suffering. i also think, where drugs like SSRIs are concerned, it can be helpful to point to studies (particularly meta-analyses) on their relative ineffectiveness, and to emphasise that you're not contradicting any individual experiences this person may or may not be describing with these drugs; the point is a wider one. i think it's understandable that many people encountering any kind of anti-psych critique will at first be extremely wary about the idea that moving away from bio-psychiatry means blaming people for their own 'illnesses' and i try to come at these conversations with a lot of patience to re-iterate that moral culpability is not an inevitable part of a non-disease understanding of mental suffering. it can also help a lot to connect this to wider disability politics, and to point out that pathologisation and medicalisation in general are not some kind of shortcut to avoid stigma and moral judgment; in fact, often the opposite.

[mentholdyke]

how do aspects of western culture create the conditions for wide spread disease? first, we have to dispel the myths of individualism vs collectivism. the argument of people from western cultures are inherently more individualistic is a farce. the very fact that many individuals seek outlets for altruism, though they may be flawed and difficult to make real change through, even when we live in a system that rewards anti-social behaviors such as resource hoarding and deception for personal gain, is some proof of that. individualism is a capitalist concept - the idea that personal advancement and enrichment is reliant on the self - self independence, self esteem, self interest - and though this may be the case in capitalist societies where a focus on the self is rewarded and collective action is punished, is it really fair then to say that the people are inherently more this-or-that when the very structures our lives depend on, rely on our ability to function as socially isolated, nonempathetic beings? certainly to survive and thrive in such a world many people have to “turn off” the parts of their brains that lead to pro-social behavior.

so, we have a culture that discourages collective action, so much so that attempts to self-establish community care by staying at home while sick usually end in us losing our jobs — even though those of us who do fight to stay home while sick do not usually have enough of a support system to stay at home in the first place, as the ruling class wrings us dry. it is more important for us to make money for the ruling class than it is for us to have a healthy and enriched life. that is the end of the question of, why isn’t anything changing as far as the amount of multiple global pandemic catastrophies since the inception of violent white supremacist and capitalist colonization.

our government legitimizes leaders who don’t believe in science, and they make decisions for communities they aren’t a part of. businesses have become somewhat “apolitical” entities who have some levels of immunity to law, since we know state law is not a suitable measure of accountability.

fighting through the law as a means of “regaining our rights” simple is an overdone conversation, and it has been for over a century. we must be the own arbiters of our fates - the information we and our neighbors recieve (education), the measures of care we provide for each other (mask blocs, no strings attached mutual aid to get through periods without income during quarantines, providing each other with medical care), our ability to fight for the people we love - these are the real things that matter.

this is going to be an extremely active, long-term effort. the HIV/AIDS fight lasted for arguably over 50 years. COVID doesn’t have to keep killing us for that long.

[humboldtfog]

Wrote a thing for the Outer Space Arcata ig, thought I'd put it here too.

Big thank you to everyone who wears masks at Outer Space, and HUGE shoutout to @maskbloceastbay for donating 100 kn95 masks this month so we can provide them for free. Mutual aid is the future! Wearing a mask helps keep our events accessible to everyone! We encourage you to support @maskbloceastbay or your local mask bloc if you can. I think we can all agree our government and the capitalist healthcare industry has failed us, so here’s a little info to help bridge the public health education gap so you can understand why we still highly encourage wearing a high quality respirator (n95, kn95, kf94, ect.) Every time you are infected with covid, even if you only have mild symptoms, it damages your immune system, and can infect cells in many parts of the body besides the lungs including the heart, brain and blood vessels. So while immunocompromised people are more at risk of long covid from one infection, even the most healthy individuals, if they get repeat infections over the years, will almost certainly end up with a damaged immune system, long covid, heart disease, brain damage, ect. While there’s a lot of things about covid we still don’t know, these things are almost certain: Everyone is at risk. Respirator masks (not surgical or cloth!) are very effective at preventing transmission. Asymptotic spread is very common, you can be contagious even if you don’t feel sick. Covid aerosols travel in the air like smoke and can linger for hours. Even better is using multiple layers of protection like getting the most updated vaccine, improving air quality, and testing regularly. You can still get eight free rapid tests a month with most insurance plans. If you need help accessing free rapid tests, free masks, or have any other questions please reach out to us or your local mask bloc. You can find a great directory at maskbloc.org and lots more info on the science of covid and reality of where we are in the pandemic at peoplescdc.org. Covid justice is disability justice, all our struggles are connected, when the systems fail it’s up to us to protect each other! 😷💉💖

[canichangemyblogname]

The two sides of any leftist debate online:

P1: “Charity does not address the systemic nature of issues. Contributing to bail funds does not achieve bail reform or abolish the prison system. Charity only distracts us; we need to overthrow the capitalist system.”

P2: “First, no one’s arguing that donations revolutionize the *system*. Second, I wouldn’t characterize giving my $ and time to help individuals as a distraction. Third, am I to understand that you have no plan to alleviate suffering in the short-term with the stop-gap measures we have right now? Your glorious revolution isn’t going to happen overnight; you should still contribute to initiatives like bail funds while *also* organizing to address structural issues.”

P1: “If you don’t dedicate all your time and resources to dismantling the system and instead dedicate some time and resources to small, charitable, or localized problems, the systemic issues will never get addressed.”

P2: “Why shouldn’t I do both? I can help an individual while organizing to help the whole. I can help one man post bail while at the same time organize with reform groups to pass initiatives defunding prisons through our legislatures.”

P1: “If you work within the system, you have no hopes of dismantling the system. Incrementalism is a disease.”

P2: “The work we do can hardly be characterized as incrementalist. But— do tell—what in god’s name are you doing to address systemic issues?”

*insert a bunch of ad hominem responses* *throw in some straw-man arguments* *then add a dash of equivocation for spice*

[boltslutters]

Speaking of music, are there any species/races that have hmm “distinct cultures”? I know the ermista are into textiles. Do others have a specific way their society functions?

Okay so Ermista have several (I don't know what happened, but I latched onto it) distinct "cultures" mainly dependant on where they live. Northern Ermista live in small villages and carry banners, while ones that live south live in bigger cities and have designated hibernation areas and don't usually carry around flags. They are a lot more competitive as they have to deal with the disease and the bird-angels their hateful sun god and have arenas to fight them and stuff. The peeps that worship SAQ have very specific rituals around who they target to be food, how they go about doing that, preparation, delegation, and all that. A lot of their art/tools are more metal heavy as that's what SAQ brings a lot of. They're also really particular about food as it's the main way they interact with their god and SAQ does bring them alien crops sometimes. They literally have the "forbidden flavors".

The tank dragons are incredibly militaristic, defending their home against the angels. A large part of the tank-dragon society (and the reason they are tank-dragons in the first place), is mimicking their lives as people. So they have arms for grabbing things, they use cups and drink in sips interspersed with "breathing", pens, doors, they talk to each other and have handshakes and wares and the like. Things that would be impractical for these tank-dragons, but done because they were once organic and want to retain some familiarity to make the transition as easy as possible. Some tank-dragons, however, didn't start as organic and have always been tank-dragons. They have a harder time living with the strange behaviors of most tank-dragons. For instance, they might not use cups in the traditional sense because it makes more sense to just drink straight from the tap until their tanks are full, but find other ways to use them (like as holders, stops, maybe like a bullhorn if it's the right kind), because they're not used to using cups and using them is inherently strange to them.

Crystal Dragons deviate the most from any of the other UFSS's members. While most of the others are religious (because worshiping gods usually means sick benefits because the gods get more power), most crystal dragons don't worship and actively reject their creator-god, Titatiaraum. Their society is more heavily focused on mortal arcana/technological advancement and Achievement, personal or societal, is a huge part of their culture. They're capitalist, and they do split and fight among each other, usually in uncharitable ways. Some DO worship the gods of the Moo (manifestations of order (no i will not apologize for the name)) pantheon due to cultural osmosis from the other members of the UFSS, but that's usually a minority.

After Titatiaraum dies and his arcanic materials of his pocket dimension are mined out and most companies pull, the remaining mining ships that remain are essentially trying to build their own culture from the ground up, released from the hold of their parent corporations and trying to get accepted into the UFSS so they can receive support. Most of it is governmental, as it has to be a government body that approaches the UFSS and orderly structures are natural to the mining ships. A lot of it is also accessibility-based, accounting for the wide range of body types, tools, sizes, etc individual ships deal with.

Paragons (pre-Titatiaraum) lived primitively as the lack of pain, suffering, even death meant that the Paragons were never incentivized to do anything besides play around and enjoy life. They're really social and personal with each other. There's no natural paragons post-Tita as they were never made to reproduce naturally; there was never a need for that. All were genetic recombinations of original Paragons, and most lived under Crystal Dragon citizenship despite most Crystal Dragons never liking them. The ogs eventually had to flee their home planet as Tita's angels died and no one could upkeep their home planet, which lacked a star and was entirely dependent on Tita for survival. A lot of post-Tita Paragons are interested in trying to preserve and perhaps revive what was lost of their home.

There's one planet whose star goes through phases of light and no light, leading to a society based around these two paradigms and preparing for the inevitable dark cycle.

Threaders have their own unique society based on their magic system of threads and looms and turning people into spindle wheels and trapping them in a rotting god's gut.

Most cyclers are like bees; they're expendable. An unholy amount is also based on racing.

One world's dominant race is a group of machines (Mins and Medis)built as a dyson sphere's first defense. They have a lot of ways their individual societies work (from the difference between Mins built for war and Mins built to maintain a town, gender being a matter of rank and not actual gender (of which they have none), they have blood and a few blood-based diseases and how mins handle them, Ouruls and what they're used for) and a whole lotta stuff I also got fixated on for a bit.

I don't have a LOT of detail (things also change with time and there's so, so many.)