#so right at the cusp of first wave feminism

[scobbe]

“Ah! Poor women, how they are misunderstood! And yet they love God in much larger numbers than men do and during the Passion of our Lord, women had more courage than the apostles since they braved the insults of the soldiers and dared to dry the adorable Face of Jesus. It is undoubtably because of this that He allows misunderstanding to be their lot on earth, since He chose it for Himself. In heaven, He will show that His thoughts are not men’s thoughts, for then the last will be first.”

- Saint Therese of Lisieux, A Story of a Soul, slyly suggesting not only does Christ suffer in solidarity with women but also that women will be elevated over men in heaven.

[stopmakingliberalslookbad]

Let’s talk about generations

Because so many people on Tumblr are grossly informed on who is a part of what generation (eg. the prevailing mentality of “Everybody who is over forty is an icky, mean Baby Boomer!“), I thought that I’d provide a handy cheat sheet of all of the generations that include currently living people, along with a couple of micro generations.

The Greatest Generation/G.I. Generation (birth years range from early 1900s to mid/late 1920s)

The youngest members of this generation are roughly 88 to 90 years old as of August 2017, so there are still plenty of them still alive and kicking. They grew up during the Great Depression and served in World War 2. Even people who didn't serve were profoundly impacted by the war. Their relationship with Baby Boomers is a mirror image of the Baby Boomers’ relationship with Millennials.

The Silent Generation (birth years range from late 1920s/early 1930s to early 1940s)

The oldest members of this generation are in their late 80s and the youngest are in their early to mid 70s as of August 2017. They tend to get lost in the shuffle between the Greatest Generation and Baby Boomers. A lot of the so-called Baby Boomers that you all complain about are actually a part of this generation.

Baby Boomers (birth years range from roughly 1945 to 1964)

Be prepared for a longer blurb and a lot of me defending this group. The oldest members of this generation are roughly 72 years old and the youngest are 52. Contrary to popular belief, most of their offspring are Gen Xers or Xennials. This generation is defined by social and cultural upheaval. The civil rights movement, Summer of Love, second wave feminism, sexual liberation, black power movements, and the Vietnam War shaped this group’s identity. They are responsible for society's major steps in becoming more progressive and liberal, so think about that when you accuse them of adhering to “traditional” values or being responsible for enacting laws that they were too young to enact in the first place. The Greatest Generation gave them a lot of grief for being absorbed in technology (said technology being television, as they were the first generation to be raised on it from childhood) and wrote them off as being entitled and “soft”. Sound familiar? Like a lot of people, some did become more conservative as they aged, but this will happen with each coming generation.

Generation Jones (birth years range from roughly 1958 to 1964)

A subgeneration of Baby Boomers consisting of people that were really too young to fully experience the upheaval of the 60s. They didn’t reach teenagehood until the 1970s.

Generation X (birth years range from roughly 1966 to sometime in the early 80s)

Now here’s where the generations start having less defined starting and ending ranges. The media has put the ending birth year as early as 1977 and as late as 1985. But overall, the oldest members of this generation are roughly 51 and the youngest are in their mid 30s. A lot of your parents are actually part of this generation and not Baby Boomers, as you’ve been led to believe. They’re often known as the “slacker” generation and defined by their cynicism. For some reason, they’re escaping blame for all of the criticism hurled towards how Millennials were raised, despite being primarily responsible for parenting them.

Xennials (birth years range from sometime in the late 1970s to roughly 1985)

A new term that has started to gain more steam recently and also the microgeneration that yours truly is a part of, so this might be a lengthier entry. Xennials are in their 30s as of August 2017 and reached teenagehood at some point during the 90s (sorry late 80s babies, you can’t sit with us). We have a blend of Gen X cynicism and Millennial optimism. Our lives are basically summed up as analog childhoods and teenage years and digital adulthoods. As an example, we’re the only group of people that went from records to cassettes to CDs to digital music formats within the first eighteen years of our lives (though some of us embraced digital music a bit later). Cell phones and social media didn’t become part of most of our lives until we became adults. We remember what life without the internet was like. We tend to be extremely hard on Millennials, probably because we’re often lumped in with them and some of us hate that.

Millennials (birth years range from sometime in the 1980s to early 2000s)

This generation’s starting and ending birth year ranges is even harder to pinpoint. The media has placed the starting years as early as 1978 and as late as 1986 and nobody can seem to agree on whether or not the ending range is the late 90s or early 2000s. Overall, if you were born between 1986 and 2001, or are between 30 and 15 as of August 2017, you are pretty firmly in the Millennial camp, although you 2000s babies might be on the cusp, especially if you were born after 9/11. Most of you reading this are probably Millennials, so I don’t need to explain what defines your generation, other than the fact that you and the Baby Boomers are basically clones of each other and both generations refuse to admit it.

Generation Z (birth year ranging from the early 2000s to present)

Today’s youth. This generation doesn’t have many defining traits yet, other than the fact that they were born after 9/11.

Generation ??

The generation after Generation Z. Nothing is known about this unborn generation, although their relationship with Millennials will almost certainly mirror Millennials’ relationship with Baby Boomers.

[operawindow9-blog]

Warzone

“People of America, when will we learn?” Yoko Ono asked over a briskly strummed acoustic guitar on her 1973 album, Approximately Infinite Universe. “It’s now or never: There’s no time to lose.” She sings those same words on Warzone, a collection of 13 songs from her back catalog that she re-recorded with their original lyrics and somber new synthesizer underpinnings. It’s been 45 years since she first urged her adoptive home to dream of a reality unblighted by violence. The words ring sadder now; the people of the United States ostensibly chose “never.”

A ferocious optimism animates Ono’s half-century career. Her early performance pieces and her 1964 book of creative prompts, Grapefruit, worked from the assumption that art was play, an inborn human faculty. She carried that humanism into the music she made, on her own and with husband John Lennon, throughout the 1970s. Impassioned, erratic vocals tore at long-held conventions of what women behind microphones should sound like. Her liberating irreverence reverberated throughout New Wave in bands like the B-52s and the Talking Heads, as well as underground experimentalists like Meredith Monk. That her legacy as a creative force was so deeply subsumed by the myth of the Beatles speaks to a slowly lifting rockist misogyny, not the quality of her work.

Warzone collects a handful of songs from Ono’s seminal ’70s records alongside tracks from 1985’s Starpeace and 1995’s Rising, plus an interlude from 2009’s Between My Head and the Sky. Most songs tell the same story: Humanity will one day achieve enlightenment and relinquish war in favor of love and unity. The unity of the message speaks to the endurance of the Ono’s idealism. While the original recordings offer a glimpse at the sheer variety of Ono’s discography—her work houses dub beats and thrash metal riffs and acid freakouts—the re-recorded versions drain each track of historical and musical specificity. Most have been slowed to a funereal tempo, which makes lyrics that once brimmed with hope sound like a concession to the ubiquitous cruelty of the present. Ono sings a 20th-century dream for a 21st-century utopia that never came to pass.

When Ono strangled the word “why” during the 1970 song of the same name, she pronounced the question like it had an answer that she could find if she screamed hard enough. She was spurring herself into action. But the 2018 “Why” loses the original’s rock instrumentation and shelves Ono’s feral vibrato. Instead, over wolf howls, trumpeting elephants, and ambient synthesizers, she wails the word as if in mourning. One “Why” looks out onto a course that has yet to be set; the other looks back onto irreversible wreckage.

“Woman Power,” from 1973’s Feeling the Space, loses its sense of spontaneous play. Roaring electric guitars and a commanding drumbeat once gave the track urgency, as if Ono really were singing on the cusp of gender liberation, as if she could sing it into being. The re-recorded take might be the track here closest to its source material, as the guitar riff and drum pattern survive for the song’s first half. But the instruments hide under Ono’s voice; rather than raw and vital, they sound spectral and faded. They soon fall away entirely, replaced by strings arranged by New York composer Nico Muhly. When the band crashes back in and guitarist Marc Ribot tears through a rote solo, it feels as though two visions of the future are competing: one in which women have already seized the power afforded to men, and one in which Ono mourns that power’s lack.

Warzone’s liner notes include a 1972 essay by Ono originally published in The New York Times. “The Feminization of Society” articulates an enduring tenet of feminism: that masculinist ideals have failed the world, and only by means of feminine survival strategies can the world be saved. She argues that women cannot compromise their liberation or achieve it within existing masculine frameworks. Women must rewrite reality by force. Some of Ono’s writing has aged well. On the other hand, she flippantly claims that black people have already achieved liberation and women must do the same, at once seemingly forgetting the existence of black women and glossing over the United States’ enduring racism. A year later, she’d release an album with Lennon that printed a racist slur on its cover. On “I Love All of Me,” originally released on Starpeace, she again uses black people as a rhetorical peg, claiming, “I’m a black man who’s come to terms with his anger.” A line no doubt meant as a bid for compassion undermines her vision of universal love, conflating black masculinity with anger without interrogating that association’s roots in white supremacy.

These moments pin Ono’s radicalism to a vision of liberation that ignores the way racism and misogyny structure the world in tandem. They feel dated and draining in a political climate where a majority of white women voted for a candidate serially accused of sexual assault, opting to safeguard the benefits of whiteness by aligning themselves with a violently misogynist party. That Ono never thought to rewrite these lyrics or the included essay while rearranging the songs themselves highlights a disconnect between the hippie utopianism of the 20th century and the current bitter fight for survival of so many.

Because its overt politics now feel so inadequate, Warzone works best as a melancholy gesture, a long look back at a time when dreaming of a better world felt invigorating rather than exhausting. Its peak comes on its last track: a recording of John Lennon’s “Imagine.” Nearly a decade after releasing the song, Lennon admitted that Ono deserved partial songwriting credit, because he had penned the lyrics around one of Grapefruit’s prompts. Here, Ono reclaims a song long offered as proof of her late husband’s towering genius.

Ono works against its engraved expectations. Her rendition is melancholy and moving; she sings tentatively against sparse electronic drone, as if reckoning with the weight of all that has been lost in the decades since Lennon sang the same words. She strains a little to hit the high notes before the chorus, the playful vocal flourish so idiosyncratic to the late Beatle. Her voice considers his absence as she pronounces some of his most famous lines: “You may say that I’m a dreamer/But I’m not the only one.” She’s right, of course, and the world she envisions here—no possessions, no nations, no want—still describes the world young radicals are fighting for against late capitalism’s heavy inertia. It’s a beautiful idea, this paradise of which she sings. It just takes more than dreams to get there.

Source: https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/yoko-ono-warzone/

[topmixtrends]

THERE HAS ALWAYS BEEN a lot of hand-wringing around erotica, especially erotica that centers on female submission. Feminists worry that it perpetuates harmful gender dynamics, while conservatives shudder at the frank depictions of female sexuality. Intellectuals usually dismiss it as smut. In the meantime, millions of people — mostly women — gobble it up. The box office success of Fifty Shades Freed, the third installment in the Hollywood trilogy based on E. L. James’s best-selling BDSM romance series, is only the latest example. How is it, wondered pundits, that this particular movie is a hit at the height of the #MeToo movement? Why are women flocking to see a film about a rich, white man dominating a much younger, much less powerful woman?

There’s no obvious reason that a movement against misogyny, sexual assault, and non-consensual advances should be incompatible with fantasies of consensual, sexual submission. For one thing, fantasies of submission are not strictly a female feminine phenomenon. A study conducted by University of Kansas psychologist Patricia Hawley in 2009 found that both men and women preferred to imagine being dominated by, rather than dominating, another person. In fact, men preferred this even more than women. In conflating #MeToo and the light BDSM of Fifty Shades, common sexual fantasy and desire immediately became pathology and neuroticism — how could women want both at once? How do we square sexual fulfillment and freedom from unwanted sexual advances?

Actually, the film’s success should not have been a surprise — and not because Jamie Dornan’s six-pack has its own fan page (it doesn’t actually, but it should). Historically, erotica that focused on female submission emerged at precisely the moment when women were beginning to challenge the status quo. The Story of O, the seminal novel by Anne Desclos (published under the pen name Pauline Réage) and largely considered the literary height of BDSM erotica, was published in France in 1954, on the cusp of the women’s liberation movement, five years after Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. Emmanuelle, an erotic odyssey of sexual liberation and submission penned by Emmanuelle Arsan, became a best seller in 1967 France, one year before the May 1968 protests, which eventually gave rise to the Mouvement de libération des femmes (MLF, Women’s Liberation Movement). Anaïs Nin’s Delta of Venus, a short story collection that features, among other tales, fantasies of sexual submission and dominance, was published in 1977 in the United States, at the height of female sexual liberation, the same year that the first National Women’s Conference was held. Meanwhile, Fifty Shades of Grey hit bookstores in 2011, just as so-called fourth-wave feminism was beginning to take off.

That these seminal works — all authored by women — emerged during or immediately preceding a wave of feminism isn’t a coincidence. In fact, the pattern seems to point to the ways in which these feminist movements might work alongside these erotic texts. In examining the bonds of patriarchal oppression, including those internalized by women, and playing out fantasies of male domination, these forms of erotica offer a fuller, more nuanced understanding of female identity and sexuality. This is an important step toward empowerment, as well as a way to mediate the anxiety inherent in dismantling traditional gender roles. If we think about erotica in this way, it’s really no wonder that millions of women want to read about, or watch, a woman consensually subjugated by a man for pleasure. All too often, in the real world, male domination just has to be endured.

In fact, it is likely that male domination, as it rightfully becomes less acceptable in the social and political spheres, should become more appealing as a fetish. As Georges Bataille argued in Erotism: Death and Sensuality, eroticism is an essential way for man and woman to confront their own limitations, including their own mortality. Because humans, unlike animals, came to grasp with their own mortality through reason, it is only when we flout reason — when we lose touch with it entirely — that we can come close “to touching the infinite”; that we can ever achieve transcendence. In climax, many of us don’t know our own names — let alone the truth of our own mortality. Any sexual satisfaction has the possibility of offering such euphoria — but, for Bataille, fetishes, or acts that defy sexual taboos, are particularly potent conduits for transcendance since, by definition, they make even less sense than so-called mainstream predilections. In Bataille’s world, we should all give up meditation and pick up a fetish instead. Indeed he asserts, “Eroticism, unlike simple sexual activity, is a psychological quest […] eroticism is assenting to life even in death.”

As women become more dominant within the spheres of reason — the economic, social, and political spheres — the desire to transgress their own taboos takes on a new urgency. In other words, the acquisition of power might lead to a desire for obliteration. This idea is actually supported by scientific research: a study published in 2009 by the Journal of Sex Research, found that socially dominant women are more likely to enjoy fantasies of submission, perceiving these fantasies as an expression of their own irresistible desirability, rather than as an exercise in force.

This may explain why more than half of the 25 books on Amazon’s best-selling erotica list feature male domination, from the relatively banal (like a forbidden love between student and professor) to the dark (like fantasies of kidnapping). The broader cultural context can also explain certain subgenres that have recently emerged as major trends within contemporary erotica. One of these erotic subgenres is “breeding,” wherein a man sexually dominates a woman with the primary intent of impregnating her and forcing her to bring his children into the world. When it comes to reproductive rights, despite the many troubling restrictions that persist today — with perhaps more on the horizon — women do have more choices than ever before (at least, in the long span of repressive reproductive history), and choice can breed anxiety. Of course, a text that might work through this anxiety does not indicate that women would like to be stripped of these rights — any more than the thrill of a horror movie suggests a latent desire to die. On the contrary, both the slasher film and the breeder fantasy are vehicles through which we can explore our deepest fears and concerns — whether we will have children, whether we can ever really be safe — thereby transgressing and hopefully, overcoming them, if only briefly. Dressed up in clichés, corny writing, and studmuffin-laden covers, these popular books can be considered tools for social empowerment and sexual liberation.

Let’s take the Story of O as an example. In the book, O — whose very name evokes a hole and its implied vacuity, a crude representation of the female sex — begins a quest to understand and prove her consuming devotion to her lover, René, through complete submission to his every whim and, later, to those of Sir Stephen, to whom René has “given” her “so that he may use her in any manner he desires.” Ultimately, O’s impulse for submission leads her down a path of total annihilation that culminates, almost inevitably, in her suicide. The last line of the novel reads: “O, seeing that Sir Stephen was about to leave her, said she would prefer to die. Sir Stephen gave his consent.”

The impulse to conflate a protagonist’s actions with the moral perspective of the author can be extremely strong, particularly when discussing works by women. It is not entirely surprising then, that even feminist critics have argued that O’s suicide promotes gender inequality and glorifies male dominance. And yet there are a number of other ways to interpret this story, as well as its ending. It is hard to believe that Desclos meant O’s demise to be viewed positively — or even literally. In fact, it seems more likely that the tragic conclusion might serve as a warning about the dangers of all-consuming subservience. If willful submission is ultimately a quest for transcendence and self-effacement — as it is in a divine or religious context — then wouldn’t death naturally be its ultimate, and most liberating, expression? Despite its sexually explicit content, O’s search is, in many ways, a philosophical journey not unlike those undertaken by religious mystics. Indeed, the conditions of O’s “training,” which takes place in a secluded castle, can be considered analogous to that of a monk’s initiation: she is induced to give up her worldly possessions, stripped of her identity, isolated, and submitted to various physical trials designed to test the will’s triumph over the body. Throughout her debasement, O finds “the chains and the silence, which should have bound her deep within herself, which should have smothered her, strangled her, on the contrary freed her from herself.”

Science might actually provide further proof for this reading. A 2009 study conducted by psychologist Pamela H. Connolly revealed that BDSM practitioners had lower levels of depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), psychological sadism, psychological masochism, borderline pathology, and paranoia compared to normative samples. What’s more, a later study, published in Psychology of Consciousness: Theory, Research, and Practice in 2016, found that both dominants and submissives entered altered states of consciousness that, while distinct experiences, were both pleasurable. Dominants entered a state of “flow,” associated with focused attention, a loss of self-consciousness and optimal performance of a task. Submissives, on the other hand, entered what is known as transient hypofrontality, a term coined by Dr. Arne Dietrich to describe the buzz that comes with intense physical exertion, or “runner’s high.” Transient hypofrontality reduces pain, and can produce feelings of floating, feelings of peacefulness and feelings of living in the here and now. The Story of O could be read as a kind of precedent to these findings, a form of finding liberation from the mental ties that might otherwise bind us.

The mainstream and literary culture’s dismissal of works like the Story of O and Fifty Shades of Grey is of course, predictable. In 1978, Audre Lorde wrote an essay titled “Uses of the Erotic: Erotic as Power,” in which she described the paradoxical way that female sexuality is often pathologized: “On the one hand, the superficially erotic has been encouraged as a sign of female inferiority; on the other hand, women have been made to suffer and to feel both contemptible and suspect by virtue of its existence.” According to Lorde, the “suppression of the erotic as a considered source of power and information” in women’s lives is one of the primary results, and functions, of gender inequality. When we ignore or demean consensual BDSM erotica, or stories about female sexual submission, we inadvertently contribute to a cultural legacy that routinely pathologizes, demeans, or erases women’s sexual desires.

Moreover, in ignoring these works, we effectively silence women authors. In Hélène Cixous’s 1975 essay, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” the act of writing is closely linked to women’s sexual pleasure and personal power — to write as a woman is always an act of transgression. Nin, in the foreword to Delta of Venus, characterizes the process of working on the project as opening a “Pandora’s Box [which] contained the mysteries of woman’s sensuality, so different from man’s and for which man’s language is inadequate.” She recognized that in opening Pandora’s Box, she would release demons as well as angels. Female sexuality, like male sexuality, has nothing to do with morality or politics. Indeed, it is, in its many varied and unfiltered forms, a source of pleasure that often defies such ethical distinctions. Until we are brave enough to investigate it unflinchingly — without turning it into a pathology, without pitting it against feminist movements — women will not be able to achieve sexual liberation. As Lorde writes:

The fear of our desires keeps them suspect and indiscriminately powerful, for to suppress any truth is to give it strength beyond endurance. The fear that we cannot grow beyond whatever distortions we may find within ourselves keeps us docile and loyal and obedient, externally defined, and leads us to accept many facets of our oppression as women.

Erotica is not at odds with today’s feminism. If erotica is written by women, if it explores the depths of unmentionable fantasies, if it helps us think through the pleasures, fears, and anxieties inherent in sex and power, it is doing feminist work. Raunchy female-penned books don’t just offer thrills — they are important vehicles through which women can explore an otherwise prohibited eroticism. If we can find a way to appreciate this kind of work, instead of undermining it, we might also find another interesting — and rather fun — route to sexual and social empowerment.

¤

Hayley Phelan writes about culture, style, travel, food, and the internet for The New York Times, New York Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, Elle, Conde Nast Traveler, Business of Fashion, and The Cut. She also has a column in the New York Times Thursday Styles Section.

The post Why We Need Erotica appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

from Los Angeles Review of Books https://ift.tt/2RHJQLN

[nonationundercanadia]

CW: fascism, nazi march, violence, death, racism, antisemitism, trump, food, KKK, guns, terrorism

X X X

This is long but it's great food for thought about the revolution.

From a comrade who was on the ground in Cville:

I have avoided being tactical up til now because I figured people needed some time. but I think it's time, or well anyway, it's on my mind and I think I have a clear picture of what's going on now.

first, politically and socially, here's what's been going on the past few days very rapidly—

we all know that trump's half assed condemnation of white supremacist organizations means nothing, his own father was a known klansman & it wouldn't surprise me if he were too. he was merely put in a position where he had to say something, and he did so in the most evasive and grating way possible.

I'm not sure if it's on the news yet, because a lot I've been avoiding it, but the justice department is going to be seeking terrorism charges against the attacker. this is obviously not because of the goodness of the administration's collective (and non-existent) heart, its purely political, and it's especially important because hitler did the same thing.

donald trump rode these people into office, he emboldened them, he contributed to (not caused, but that's for later) a rise in their numbers and visibility, he leveraged their rage and that is why he is in the white house after one of, if not the single most, contentious elections in our country's history. he appointed people like bannon to his inner circle, he winked at them, and signaled to them that he was their guy at every turn. the charge of white supremacy is one that has followed him his entire political career.

but now he has real power, and since that has happened, he has made moves to distance himself from them. it's been too slow, but now it is nearly complete.

saturday, his dog came off the chain and killed someone. and that wouldn't bother him so much if it didn't happen in front of cameras in a way that is very difficult to wave away or deny. because it's not the first time they've killed people, it's just the first time it happened on a live stream in broad daylight in a crowd of thousands. it made noise. too much for him to drown out.

so what does the administration do? it seeks terrorism charges. it comes down hard, it shoots its rabid dog and throws the monsters that made them (and that they made in turn) under the bus.

this is why I referenced hitler. when you have real power, you don't need the brown shirts anymore, so you get rid of them. they've become a liability to him now.

believe me, they agree with me on that. cucked again. they're enraged.

what I haven't decided is if this means we can expect them to regroup and act out like a cornered animal, or whether they'll retreat to lick that wound for awhile.

what I do know is this. there were roughly one thousand white supremacists in charlottesville on saturday, and obviously not everyone made it. there are estimated to be roughly three thousand ISIS fighters globally, total.

you see where I'm going with this?

they are enraged, they are armed, they are willing and eager to kill.

meanwhile, while I have been dealing with centrist trash and the usual reactionaries spouting off nonsense and what, to them, surely sounds like logic, I have seen people waking up.

I have seen people who identified as pacifists realizing that that doesn't apply to nazis, I have seen people who I have never seen post politically condemn them and praise those who fought them, I have seen people who voted for trump feel shame and begin to grapple with what they have done and resolve to make it right. dr cornel west told the washington post and the new york times and anyone who would listen that without "the anarchists and antifascists" he and other clergy would be dead. he literally said the word anarchists. correctly.

today I saw an antifa flag raised on a very official flag pole in front of a city court house, with the blessing of the mayor, and a crowd of very normal looking people cheering.

this is a P I V O T A L moment. there are many of them throughout history, but this is one of them. undeniably. we are in an incredible position to radicalize people, a position that I genuinely believe we have not been in a hundred years at least, if ever.

it only enrages me that this is what it took. both because it took such tragedy, but also because I know, y'all know, and I'm sure heather heyer knew, that had it not been a white woman, killed by a white man, the response wouldn't have been the same. we cannot let her death, and the invisible deaths of all that came before her, be in vain.

so what now?

we all know that there will be a "before charlottesville" and "after charlottesville", in the hearts of those who saw it, in the way we do organizing, in the way they do, and in the way the police prepare and respond. I'm not totally sure what all of those moving pieces will look like, but I think we can expect escalation, because this was nothing if not a blood soaked line in the sand.

I have long said that literally the three single most important things we can be doing are:

✓community defense: arm ourselves, patrol, have an alert system, train in firearms and hand to hand combat and situational awareness and tech security and medical aid

✓community infrastructure/sovereignty: food, clothing, shelter, and other resources. this means community care and outreach, this means food shares and gardens and clothing swaps and rides and babysitting, a childcare collective, this means a community pharmacy, this means relying on ourselves absolutely as much as possible for everything we need

✓community education: this means radicalizing people as well as continuing our own radical education. this means workshops, seminars, salons and book clubs. this means making radical theory accessible, this means making it palpable (and liberation should be the most palpable thing in the world).

while the last two are the most ongoing, the most tedious, the most important to foundation, it's that first one that has just become imperative. it is absolutely time to prepare. we are not yet ready for what is coming, but we will be. arm yourselves, train yourselves, ready yourselves, harden yourselves (without losing your heart).

different people among you will be cut out for different pieces of this work. that is okay, we need all of you. do not judge people doing a different work than you are. this process is involved and constant. do not question the commitment of your comrades in different fields, who excel at different things. respect a diversity of tactics. respect people taking self-care breaks. take them yourself, please, because burnout is real, and capitalism keeps coming. it is not enough to come together over our political proclivities and shared rage, we must be friends, community, family. we have to respect and love each other. we have to laugh together.

if you are new here, we welcome you, there is plenty of work to be done. ask me about it, and I'll point you to it.

this won't be an easy task. the fact of the matter is that fascism is on the rise globally, and as we slide further into the throes of climate change the conditions will only ripen. resource collapse, economic collapse, war, famine, and the fall of nations. it's all coming, and before it kills us or turns hollywood dramatic, it will quietly give way to fascism. it's coming. this is the consequence of end stage capitalism, of deregulation. we are slouching toward entropy, and we have to be prepared.

we are on the cusp of choosing, as a nation, and a planet, whether the future will be one of oppression or liberation, fascism or collectivism. we do get a choice, but it's going to get dark, it's going to get bloody, and you have to dig in.

that's it. that's all I got. turn this into pasta if you wanna.

from Leftist Feminism