#monad.txt

[leftmusing]

absolutely incredible scenes on channel 4 last night

[leftmusing]

joe lycett shredding £10k in protest of david beckham's relationship with qatar and the regime's dangerous human rights infringements of LGBTQ+ people

see his statement here

edit: since this post, joe lycett has announced that he donated £10k to charity before even announcing his empty threat towards david beckham.

[leftmusing]

just some of the fucking insane, draconian things taking place in the uk from the last few days.

source: ukfactcheckpolitics on instragram

[leftmusing]

so right now, the nhs are cancelling hospital appointments, including cancer treatments, as a sign of "respect" towards dead bitch lizzy. multiple people have been arrested for holding signs that say "not my king" and "abolish the monarchy", for yelling at prince andrew of nonceville that he's a sick old man, and people are being questioned by the police over holding up a blank sign. a blank sign. all the while, liz truss is legalising fracking in the uk, planning to build more nuclear power plants, king charles isn't expected to pay the 40% inheritance tax on dead mummy dearest's massive wealth, and even though the whole country is coming to a halt for the sake of one dead cunt, people still have to go to work and school as usual. and schools are using this to "educate" children about the queen's "incredible" history. so, propaganda and brainwashing. a person dies every 50 minutes in this country because of the cold and heating bills, and this is before the huge price hike in october, which has been capped at an insanely high £2500 and we, the general public, are expected to pay for that out of our taxes when the energy companies have more than enough to cover it and still be taking in a sickening amount of wealth and profit. homeless people (me, hello!) are having food deliveries from charities cancelled out of respect for the queen. and to top it all off, footage of a protest against police brutality and murder of chris kaba was reported on an official news channel as people marching in mourning of the queen. this country is fucking sick. and i can't even sit here and type that the system is broken, because it's not. it is working exactly as intended. the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, more brainwashed, and more bootlicking. i have seen people get called disrespectful for stating the bare essential facts about what's going on in this country right now because it's "not the time."

now is the only time. fuck this country. i hope it burns to a fucking crisp. and the majority of the population are too blinded by the stolen jewels of the monarch's bloodstained crown to see that this is fascism, functioning and thriving.

off with their fucking heads.

[leftmusing]

I'm pretty avidly against cancel culture from the perspective of those mindsets reoccurring in daily interpersonal relationships and the damage it has on mental health, definitions of justice and social cohesion, but sometimes I take a step back from that and think that "wow. even against men in power, this is very counterproductive."

hear me out.

largely, cancel culture was kind of birthed as its own separated practise at the same sort of Internet time period as the #MeToo movement first gained traction, and the original intentions of this was to hold dangerous men in power accountable and to deplatform them. I could go on a whole separate ramble about accountability, justice and deplatforming, but that's not the point of this post. at its core at the beginning, cancel culture was held with good intention to hold bad, powerful, rich people accountable.

right?

but there's irony in this. because what cancel culture has degenerated into has become a much more concerning, damaging issue, mainly to friendship circles, community cohesion and minority groups. these powerful, dangerous men that this movement was originally supposed to be against, aka, the 1% of wealth, the people behind media censorship, the CEOs of social media and people in government, for example, have very cleverly over the past 5 or 6 years(ish) drip fed subtle, psychological techniques to take this notion of cancel culture and use it to pit communities against each other. they have successfully turned the collective internet's attention away from them and towards each other.

at the end of the day, these aren't left vs right issues, although that's what these people would have you believe. this should be all of us vs them. the small but dangerously powerful statistical minority.

isn't it fucked up? isn't it fucked up that we are all so caught up in these echo chambers carefully constructed by those who wish to distract us that we have forgotten the main issues? isn't it fucked up that we're more focused on digging up dirt and harassing our neighbours, our friends, our community members, instead of actually bothering to fight for the justice we claim to desire?

and the most damning of it all, is that every post, every tweet in an argumentative thread, every reblog that spreads doxxing information about a teenager who said a slur once, every comment on a post trying to cancel a minority who has simply made a human mistake, is money in the pockets of those controlling this. the evil, twisted people that we should be putting our efforts into fighting against are profiting off of the movement that was supposed to take them down.

so, above the sociopolitical and interpersonal reasons I can't abide cancel culture, this is most significant to me. how deeply counterproductive it is.

the powerful men turn us against each other over the shield of computer screens and keyboards, we fall into mass echo chamber delusion and pick fights and cancel campaigns against each other, and they sit back and watch in delight that the long term coercion they've had over the media's dynamic is finally paying off. literally paying off.

so stop wasting what you think is activism on old tweets from one of your old high school buddies where they said something shitty. stop wasting this energy on taking down the people on the same societal standing as you. stop letting yourself get so enraged over somebody having a conflicting opinion to you, and start channelling that anger into the shit that the far left actually stands for: revolution.

because cancel culture isn't left. it just isn't. it isn't activism.

that's what the powerful, dangerous people in power would like you to think.

[leftmusing]

a brief summary of the state of the uk from the last week. who wants to resurrect guy fawkes?

source: ukfactcheckpolitics on instragram

[leftmusing]

steal from chain supermarkets. resell that shit. vandalise with protest stickers. seek out an autonomous community space. write letters to prisoners. volunteer with homeless food distribution charities. spread the word. show radical support to the marginalised left — especially cancelled leftists. do not penalise those on the same social standing as you. follow independent journalists. be a warrior with any and all of the tools you have at your disposal. don't just go against the grain, burn the wood in which the grain is formed and reduce it to ash.

fuck the oligarchs. fuck the monarchists. fuck the tories. fuck the corrupted left. fuck the centrists. fuck the identitarian, instagram infographics, aesthetic revolution.

don't eat the rich. kill the fuckers. burn their buildings, burn their structures both literal and proverbial. protest the monarchy. know your fucking rights.

all we have to lose are our chains.

[leftmusing]

we really need to start looking at more comprehensive ways to ensure thorough internet safety.

these days, i find myself desensitised and used to seeing things that are downright worrying, scary, and developmentally stunted because of how normal it's become for social media companies to value profit and revenue over the safety of minors online. more and more, i see younger and younger teenagers posting drastically inappropriate content to public forums — lists of vulnerabilities, real names, sexual jokes, a comprehensive breakdown of identities. it's somehow become normal for people to link a carrd or pin a post listing diagnoses/self diagnoses, trauma, endless terms of identification, dni lists longer than the constitution, etc. it's accepted behaviour, even encouraged by most adults online, and to be frank, it's perturbing how much of a lack of internet safety awareness and digital footprint is taught to under 18s now.

this has been a pretty drastic change sociopolitically in internet spaces, quickly developing in less than 10 years. and it's not the kids' fault — not by any means. they're taught that listing intimate and personal details about themselves on unprotected public domain is somehow a rite of passage within queer spaces, that they need to prove something about their sickness, that they need to have sickness if they don't already to be treated with attention and respect (which is something all children want and all children deserve. just not this sort of attention).

as queer adults, we're doing nothing. we're taking no responsibility to protect the trans kids we claim to with pastel gifs and trending hashtags. there's no differentiation between adult spaces and young people's spaces, no clear divide between content that's appropriate and content that isn't. it's accepted and encouraged that children use websites with minimal safety settings and guidelines that have no foolproof age verification process, and nobody seems to blink an eye.

i remember being 14/15 on social media very clearly. it's still recent history. but comparing the privacy walls, age verification blocks and legitimate pop ups requiring proof of ID before continuing onto inappropriate content to what there is (or rather, what there isn't) nowadays, is frankly scary.

one of the most troubling things for me is how these conversations are often reduced to discourse between adults and children which is wildly and unwholesomely counterproductive. have we all forgotten concepts of power imbalance that we practise with the children in our real day to day lives? because when i see topics like this online, it's never anything more than people beefing about "minors DNI" or "18+ DNI" or "you're a groomer for following me without realising i'm 16" or "where are your mommy and daddy".

frankly, we should all be ashamed of ourselves. we should be ashamed of ourselves for generationally starting the trend of hypervigilantly self pathologising, spreading genuine misinformation in pursuit of appearing morally puritanical, encouraging the conclusions that 13 year olds are drawing about having personality disorders, and exacerbating inattentive personality traits and proceeding to tell children who are victims to the algorithmic machine that they must have ADHD.

we need to do better. we need to show up for questioning and queer teens online. we need to open a dialogue about online spaces and age specific forums/websites that honour the humanity and boundaries of adult and minor on equal levelling.

because we're making the younger half of our generation sick with our own sickness. the difference is, we're old enough to know and do better — they're not.

[leftmusing]

the reality of what cancel culture has become is a practise that actively and maliciously stunts growth, rehabilitation and reform. and when those who are still engaging in cancelling challenge this, they say that cancel culture isn't real, and that it's just accountability.

accountability now has become a buzzword associated with vindictive behaviour, and it's more likely for people to be more averse to holding themselves "accountable" now, than if they'd been asked it say, ten years ago.

not that accountability has a specific enough definition, practise and moral grounding to work as an idea when it comes to doing or saying things that hurt others. what accountability has become in the age of cancel culture, is removing yourself from support systems, platforms, financial stability and boundaries of your personal life, and if one doesn't take "accountability" willingly, you're forced into it by the cancel brigade. it's punitive, and punitive justice doesn't work.

let's equate cancel culture and accountability with USA and UK justice systems for a moment, hypothetically. these are countries that operate with a punitive justice system, and we only need to look at data to know that it doesn't work. for example, the reoffending rates in the UK within 8 years of imprisonment is 77%, cited here, and in the USA, "within three years of their release, two out of three former prisoners are rearrested and more than 50% are incarcerated again."

both of these countries use prison systems that function on punishment of the offenders, and gratification of the public. it's very similar to the whole notion of throwing tomatoes at those in the stocks — the public gain gratification from watching criminals have their basic rights, freedoms and support systems stripped away. and in these prison systems, offenders are dehumanised, insulted, physically harmed, berated and isolated.

this is painfully similar to cancel culture. those who are cancelled are dehumanised, insulted, isolated, berated, and yes, sometimes even physically harmed. there have been cases of cancel culture leading to murder and suicide, and what? all for the sake of those instigating it to feel a bastardised sense of gratification from what they call justice? this doesn't help people, whether they've actually done a shitty thing or not, whether that thing was severe and violent or some mean words said on the internet. and it doesn't work, because punishment and punitive justice doesn't stop those problems — it exacerbates them. it angers people who are being targeted and often, leads them to want to retaliate. and if they don't retaliate, they lose everything.

now, what does work? let's go back to comparing prison systems to justice and rehabilitation. take a look at norway and the way their prison systems function. in the 90s, norway completely reformed their prison system from punishment to rehabilitation. since that change, recidivism rates have dropped from 60-70% to 20%. and in those prisons, offenders are treated with respect, trusted with freedom, offered therapy and education, and aren't berated. when offenders are given support systems, help, therapy and kindness, they stop offending. they get better.

the same can be said for people who aren't criminals, but for instance, have said or done something that is "cancellable". even abusers, and people who have done incredibly shitty things. when given support, therapy, education, kindness, people will change. people will grow. and those behaviours that are the cause of cancellations, and by proxy, mental health crises, addiction, being at risk of attack and suicide, will decrease.

it's not a complicated issue to solve. it's not fucking difficult, when faced with the question 'how do we stop people from doing shitty things?'

the answer is there. we stop punishing them. we don't strip them of support systems, we don't publicly humiliate them, we don't simulate tragically fascist right wing practises of punitive justice, twisted gratification and policing on smaller scales in our own communities. it isn't logical, it isn't sensible, and it certainly isn't left wing.

i'm sick and fucking tired of seeing people argue that cancel culture is social justice, for a good cause, and left wing. it's none of those things, and it's high time the genuinely politically left reclaim the notion of community and kinship and help our families, friends and acquaintances instead of handing out punitive justice like armchair judges and jurors. chuck that shit in the bin and start being nice to people again.

[leftmusing]

moments in history

[leftmusing]

so i found out thanks to my two little siblings that school hours in the uk are being increased in an attempt by the government to increase academia and overall higher grades in students. no i don't have a source to link, i'm just saying words rn but. but.

what the fuck do high grades actually do. as somebody who was a drastic overacheiever in school and college, what... what do they do? specifically gcse grades

i sat my gcse exams much later than my peers because i fucked up secondary school bc of my mental health and had to go down a different route. bc of sitting them older than most, i was the first year to have grades based off 1-9.

i got a 9 in my english and i remember crying because i was so proud of myself. it felt like i finally had some hope, and that i could feel better about how much of a failure i thought i was in everything else. because that was the mindset that was drilled into me. don't get high grades in your gcses? then your life is gonna be ruined!

guess what! my life is ruined anyway. regardless of my level 9, regardless of being on the gifted and talented register, regardless of the distinctions i got in college, my life is in the gutter. i dropped out of uni after two weeks and take deep, deep pride in the stupid parts of myself now. i truly, deeply love the fact that i don't know it all and can be a total fucking idiot about a lot of things.

my grades didn't fucking matter. they didn't change anything. they didn't make me more or less worthy of a good life or self love, nor should lower grades.

grades aren't a measure of intelligence. academia isn't a measure of intelligence. it's all pseudointellectual, classist shit that's fed to us, so that the government can control how we feel about ourselves and our future, merely based on a number on some paper after a test.

secondary school doesn't fucking matter. college doesn't fucking matter. degrees don't fucking matter. they don't get you the golden ticket to a shimmering future like you're told they do. education from elsewhere matters. your class, status, background and luck matters. how you treat people and act, what mindsets you carry independently, the way you choose to do things? matters.

fuck grades. fuck being smart. fuck that shit. big up low wage "low skilled" workers, big up the unemployed, big up the disabled, big up those without a posh dialect and immediately get labelled as thick. stop telling kids that their futures are hanging in the balance over a number between 1 and 9 that they get stamped with when they're a child

[leftmusing]

wanting to die is a byproduct of not wanting to live the life you have. but things can't get better like you wish they would once you're dead. they can if you stay alive. sure, not tomorrow, not next week, not next month. probably not even next year. maybe, in ten years time, you'll be living comfortably with enough moments of happiness to keep you content with what you have. maybe sooner, maybe later. but one day.

that can't happen if you're dead. you can't be the person you wish you were if you're dead, so let's not do that. not yet. the 'getting worse before you get better' part is worth it, because one day, you'll be better. and you'll be so grateful that you, now, stuck it out and fought the long fight.

and yeah. the long fight sucks. yeah, you're right, why should you have to wait a month, a year, a decade? why should you have to cope with the uncertainty of your future? and you're right. you shouldn't have to. but it's that, or you don't get what you want. you deserve what you want, and that is to stop the life you're living. do that by understanding that one day, you won't be anymore. if you want it, fight for it. even if fighting hurts.

one day you will be comfortable, and you will be so, so proud of yourself for all the fighting you did and all the tears you cried. i promise.

[leftmusing]

0.15% of the entire adult population of england voted for liz truss.

this is undemocratic. her appointment is a fucking joke. this country needs a general election and mass civil unrest and disobedience.

if you've been waiting for the right time to protest... now is the time. get involved. organise demonstrations. enough is enough, don't pay, or even an independent protest unrelated to named campaigns. fuck shit up. disobey. if you wanna bring down this government so fucking badly, go and do it. now is the time.

support your strikers. reach out to the public with leaflets and information. put stickers around your neighbourhood. scream and holler and don't pay your fucking energy bills until those tory party motherfuckers have no choice but to submit.

anarchism and anti-government schools of thought aren't an aesthetic to subscribe to. if you're going to claim these politics, then fucking do it. the fire is in the air now. don't wait any longer, lest it burn you.

[leftmusing]

this is a screenshot from my instagram story

hey people :) i'm putting together a zine on cancel culture, focusing specifically on queer/leftist communities and the infighting that happens. as part of this, i'm looking for any queers/leftists who may like to contribute with completely anonymous stories of their experiences being cancelled, with a huge emphasis on protection of privacy and safety.

all contributors will receive a percentage of eventual sales from the zine :) financial logistics not yet worked out!

the project is in its baby stages right now, but anyone who'd be interested, please fill out this google form and DM me here or on my instagram (which would be preferable if possible!)

please share!

[leftmusing]

ever feel like you're stuck in this god awful cycle of mindlessly staring at a screen, getting burnt out with people over the screen, getting desensitised to world tragedy, wanting to put your phone down but getting overwhelmed with depression so staying on your phone, because you're too fucking numb to even get out of bed to distract yourself with anything else, and then back to the beginning?

yeah, me too

if there is one single piece of advice I could ever give to others in this shitty cycle that's been psychologically imposed on us through a drip feeding of dependency throughout covid, it's this. and I swear to god, it works for me. if only for a day or two of relief, it works.

when you notice yourself stuck on the last stage of that cycle? let it continue for the rest of that day. stay on your phone, and set a reminder and phone alarms for the next day at around midday that says "put your phone down."

and prepare yourself emotionally before you go to sleep for the next day to be a day with no mindless scrolling. just one day. even if you return to it in the evening.

by doing this the night before, you're not overwhelming yourself with a task to do immediately, which would likely make that depression feeling way worse. setting the task for the future gives you the emotional distance to be able to process it and prepare for it, and makes it more likely for you to be able to go through with it.

and then the next day, when you get that reminder or alarm, you're prepared to do it. so you fucking do it. I don't give a shit what you do with your time instead, it doesn't really matter. it doesn't even have to be productive. you could literally just put your phone down, leave it in another room and go and watch TV for hours. you could cook. you could workout. you could play some music. you could have a shower or bath and practise some gentle self care. you could hang out with some friends or family if they're available. you could engage in any of your hobbies. or you could just get your shoes on and go for an aimless wander. nip to the shops and buy yourself a snack, get wasted, get laid, I don't care. it doesn't matter. anything to fill your time without your phone, if not for a whole day, at least for a few hours.

I promise you, it'll do some good. it's enough of a circuit breaker to give your brain some fucking breathing space from this cesspit of a digital world. and even if you fall back into the routine the next day or the day after, at least you did that one bit.

you'll feel better for it. coming from a lonely, mentally ill, disabled, unemployed drop out who used to turn my nose up at simple solutions — it really is actually that simple.

sometimes, boomers are right. put your fucking phone down (affectionately)

[leftmusing]

it exhausts me that communities, especially online communities, are so focused on fighting against each other, because regardless of how much you claim to be left-wing or anti-system or against the government, in engaging with listless online discourse against opposing political ideas, you are directly feeding into the division that is being created and manufactured by the governmental systems you claim to hate.

this is a post specifically for left-wing online communities, from one to another, because you, we, need to hear it the most.

you can't exist online nowadays without unwittingly stumbling upon an argument or discourse online regarding something political or identitarian. and often, the left-wing folk who are engaging in this discourse are the sort of people who will likely subscribe to the following ideological concepts:

prison/police abolition

anti-government

anti-punitive justice

the painfully ironic thing about this, is that again, these left-wing online communities will be engaging in punitive justice on small scale community levels through cancel culture, or falling into the government's plan to create more political division in the country.

i'll start with cancel culture. i've already written about equating cancel culture with punitive justice, which you can read here, so i won't delve too deep into the logistics of that here too. read at your own leisure. but something that is almost comically ironic is that a lot of the time, people who engage in cancel culture also subscribe to the abolitionist mindset. they will lecture and profess that the prison and police systems aren't working, that prisoners should be treated with human decency, and that punitive justice is a failed system. but in the same breath, they will engage in harassment campaigns about people living in their own communities, or about people in mutual circles online, over a "problematic" post, or "receipts", accusations, etc. people fighting against punitive justice will levy it against others in a more digestible, disguised format that is "social justice" (ironically, there is no justice in this behaviour. least of all for society.) these people police their community's language, ideology and mindsets, and when they don't align with their own watered down, instagrammable version of leftism, people are exiled. people are punished.

let's move onto how these attitudes are contributing to and strengthening the systems they claim to be against. this is a bit of a loaded one, but bear with me.

speaking as a UK citizen, the government system in place is there to divide us. it works better when its peoples are divided. corporations with influence over government, politicians using social media as a platform, each post and comment being a money making machine for these interlocked systems; it's all part of the bigger picture. this system isn't broken, it's working exactly as intended. right now, social cohesion is at a devastating low, and the political divide grows as quickly as the wealth divide does. to put it simply, the government wants our attention to be on right wing trolls in comment sections. the government wants us to be blindly attacking each other, they want us to be cancelling each other, they want us to be exiled from our own communities. because when that happens, there's less power in numbers. less people united to fight back against them, the ones who are the root cause of the country's inequalities.

whether you lean left or right, whether you're far or more centre, nobody is content, fully, with how this government is functioning. yet we take it out on each other. we blame it on the neighbour down the street who has a union jack flag hanging out the window, or the neighbourhood who has a progress pride flag. we take it out on each other, when we are all struggling to heat our homes and feed ourselves or our families. we take it out on the trans community to find a tangible place for the british public to displace their anger, and then the trans community take it out on each other, levying transmed and truscum against each other, discourse about dysphoria and gender stereotypes, and call outs about other trans people who don't subscribe to the "woke" train of thought.

this is carefully constructed. all of this is linked. from prison systems, to social media corporation income, to unions and strikers, to cancel culture, to social cohesion, to right vs left, to trans issues being politicised, to poverty. these links aren't stabs in the dark or coincidental — they are carefully interlocked. a delicate system of oppression and division that is working in beautiful, disgusting harmony.

the most left-wing thing to do right now, is to stop levying your anger at fellow citizens who don't subscribe to your school of thought. the most left-wing thing to do is to stop fucking cancelling people, or getting enraged that somebody said the wrong or "problematic" thing. the most left-wing thing to do right now is stop deluding yourself that you can change a far-right trolls mind in the comment section on a post to give yourself a sense of recreational debate and ego.

the best thing to do is to turn your attentions to the ones causing those problems. not those who are a product of it.