talked a lot with someone else tonight about the problems with Leftist Content - the incentives which drive them to reactionary actions and attitudes, and an inability to reach new people, the siloing of content into algorithmic bubbles, the niche ideological milieu discourses, the same refrains which get no easier to deal with on the 100th time hearing them.
it makes me wonder what's possible beyond what i went through.
a new generation of those willing to speak their mind on things in society they're frustrated with is being born. and a lot of energy that could be directed at healthy critique of systems and structures of power is being directed towards framing interpersonal disputes as political disputes because leftists get tailwagged so fucking easily. twitter made it *too* easy, which is why leftists are mass-exodusing.
mostly i feel like we've all failed to do the work in collectively establishing the frameworks and structures that enable us all to open up discourses further, with a mind towards multi-directional empathy and without Final Answers.
i'm not going to pretend i have any solutions. but i can't help but wonder if it'd be possible to start building some of this. pick a few sites of struggle, get involved with them in person, and try to explore the concepts that arise through the struggle in a piece of "content" - rinse and repeat.
perhaps significant ground could be covered if a group that's friendly with each other and adjacent to each other's politics enough from the get-go coordinated similar strategies in different places, with different sites of struggle.
@exiliaex groups are nodes of power and nodes of power attract fascist personality types like flies to shit, i think you can only ever work with people, with individuals but you also gotta accept that most people arent really interested in deviating from reproducing the current state of things as much as they'll claim otherwise. it's convenient for their social cohesion to not see the part they play in it and their radicalness will only extend to seeing how others reproduce what they consider to be the ills of society. in general you're probably better served to focus on reaching out to something that isnt severely retarded in the first place and focus on communicating with non human animals and hope some humans follow your example than to do something that looks like the preaching and organizing that the rest of the fascists do to play power games with each other and filter deviance.
@ZiaNitori i understand where you're coming from and don't entirely disagree - but groups exist just as much as people do. there's no way to "just work with people as individuals."
i definitely am not interested in the preaching and organizing you refer to. and i do think that some sites of struggles worth looking into and working with are non-human sites of struggle. environments, ecosystems.
but there's also other groupings i've been thinking about that are less "a group" and more abstractly applied to everyone. like every "lefty" talks about "third places" in discourses about how capitalist modernity has destroyed the ability to live and have organic interactions through the monetization of social space. but i wanna go a step forward beyond notions of "third places" and talk about more ways to take social spaces back. in one framing the language of "rights" arises - what right do we have to The City, to space, to just Being outside, which i'd like to avoid, if i can. but "rights" are a common way to introduce people to certain concepts, so i'm not entirely opposed.
@exiliaex rights are a thing granted from something you are comfortable being subordinate to, a creature who respects themselves as an autonomous being thinks about what they are capable of doing and how to get to someplace that's better, not fiddling with what they have the justification to do. i agree that groups exist insofar as humans are a weird colony thing and it's often more coherent to engage with a colony as its own thing but i'm not really interested in talking to people who's behavior is better described as a function of the state as being a part of something bigger than themselves, i'm looking for the cogs that dont fit in the machine and trying to teach them how to move on their own and that takes engaging with them as an individual so they can start to see themselves that way
@ZiaNitori sorry i hadn't responded to this yet.
i agree with you about rights, for the most part. but i also think justice and thus 'justification' plays heavily into what someone considers as the "someplace better" that they're trying to get to. i think "rights" can be used to bridge discourses and action. i don't know if this makes sense to you. but i think there is a defiant form of rights-discourse that *is* interested in people being autonomous and discovering what they're capable of doing moreso than a "subordinate to something" discourse.
example: "i have the right to be in public and i will fight you if you try to remove me" - rights here is not about asking permission.
i also spend my time, in my personal life, around the cogs that don't fit in the machine and trying to learn together (moreso than just 'teach them') how to move through the world in a way that maximizes their power. i don't think it's about everyone being individual though. part of learning how to move through the world is learning how to exist in groups. to act in groups. even if the group is just "me and my friends"
i don't really know exactly what you mean with your colony statements. i'm not really talking about colonies when i'm talking groups. i'm talking about certain levels of shared experience. even something as simple as "people who live near the water" vs "people who live near the mountain" - even if nothing "official" groups either of these groups together, i think there is a real experience shared. even if other things modulate that experience to be closer or further away from others in the grouping.
@exiliaex justification is something for another, reasons are what you can use for yourself. the feeling of wanting something "better" for others is usually just flimsy cope for wanting to control and ensnare the actions of others. i dont need the right to be in public to want to fight for my autonomy wherever i am and i think this attachment to the framing of rights is positioned on top of a rhetorical trap that opportunist types will use to twist into some form of obligation and control over others. you cannot give these types a single inch of space to use your virtues as their tool. i say "teach them" not to diminish the collaborative effort that learning is but more that i feel like i had the space to develop myself in ways that have made me very distinctively more autonomous than others, to the degree where i keep learning new things everyday about how different nearly everyone seems to be from me and i think that autonomy is a critical skill for being able to have non abusive/dependent relationships in the first place. i think a lot of cool people do try to head in the same relative direction i've headed with myself but i rarely ever see anyone with as clear of a perspective on it as mine in both expressions and actions. there is no "existing in groups" you are relating to several different people, abstracting that to a group gives the social more power than it already has and is also a failure to understand the complexity of the relationships you're in. there is no norm that can be applied uniformly across a group that wouldnt be reducing something that has no need to be reduced. there is no shared experience, every body is different and stores their experiences differently. it's a terrible disservice, especially to very different creatures, to reducing things down to common experience. you can of course keep moving closer to *some* kind of understanding as your mind paints a more complete illustration of the being you're interacting with, but you could always be interpreting some part of them completely wrong and you're probably going to be blind to so many things like that simply because it's convenient to understand things to be "like you fundamentally". wrt the colony stuff it's slightly reductive but i think it works for the purpose of illustration but i see colony species as a potential for a multitude of creatures to come together to eventually form a distinct body of it's own, think the evolution of single celled things to multicellular.
@exiliaex i think human beings are clearly at the stage where you can consider them a colony species if you stop taking what they say about themselves and their actions at face value, faces are only still used to assist with assimilation and as a matter of habit. when i see people talk about the state as leviathan i see that same recognition that these people are merely part of something bigger than themselves, something that reproduces itself with it's own drives. i see specialization as the retarding of the autonomous human to perform simpler tasks in specific areas of the body, to receive orders from only specific sources, to tolerate longer periods of inactive captivity, to be exchangeable and replaceable by another without too much disturbance like any other specialized cell. families, businesses, churches, gangs and subsections of governments all form their own little organs each with their own function that together creates a beast called society whose body takes on a more distinctive shape every time a new fence or cage is put up. the "cogs that dont fit the machine" line is meant to frame the machine as this larger creature. the goal then in that illustration is to take the pieces that get cycled out and replaced by society and point them towards autonomy so they can form healthier relationships like much of the other species on this planet instead of being abused inside a rotting corpse of a creature that's about to choke on it's own waste from it's infinite metabolism and die.
@exiliaex like i get wanting to function in something of a group context, i play support far far better than i lead because i'm much better at criticizing something than coming up with a coherent direction out of whole cloth but i happen to be in a situation where i have to be leading not only myself but others for the moment. it feels like tedium to weigh out all the different options for things as they relate to everything that could be important to you and then make a clear decision, i'd rather be being critical of the plans of someone just a little bit more impulsive/less hesitant than me, because since it feels like tedium i'll reflexively get avoidant to that kind of stuff which functionally means i get avoidant about making direction for my life unless i specifically do something to compensate for that. i think that in order to have a healthy relationship with others you have to have the ability to actually be independent from them, you have to have the ability to make your own direction if you need to, you have to have the ability to feed/shelter/ect yourself and without that you can only have relationships of domination and dependency and most people have been crippled with being totally incapable of making direction for themselves relying either on direct orders or, if they want to look more independent, just solving for what's socially acceptable and contorting their soul to desire that. you cant just start talking to people like this about "groups" and mutually beneficial stuff because they dont solve for what's also beneficial to them because they've never tried to do that calculus before, the most they'll know how to do is notice when they're getting screwed over relative to someone else. all you're doing when talking to people about what's mutually beneficial is invoking the good of all which is functionally just speaking the holy language of authority at them and creating and imposing the category of a group on them might as well be what workplaces do when they do the "we're like family here" rhetoric. the aggressively independent language i use is to ward off and expose this subservient dependent logic that seemingly everyone else is running on while providing an illustration of an autonomous ideal that can be worked towards to build the foundation of something healthier, something less coercive.
@exiliaex you just cant talk to someone who's still fundamentally a religious person and say "we". "we" to a more independent creature is a category that contains the independent wills of themselves and the other creatures included in the statement. "we" to a thing that's been trained to be an appendage of a larger creature is a command. you are taking the mantle of a cluster of neurons giving instruction to some muscle tissue invoking the well functioning of the whole body. it takes a long time developing a relationship with another before you can really say "we" with any confidence in the first sense of the word and when you do activism around "common interest" over "common experiences" all you're doing is invoking the religious "we". that stuff is a crutch anyway. it's always so much more powerful to just focus on doing what's good for you in a way that works like a beacon for others to look to and learn from and the hivemind power-hungry trash that normally clogs up the room when you start talking about mutual interests will generally look elsewhere. you just actually have to have a confidence in your actions that comes from you, not by making reference to something external like the good of all and most people have no idea where to start looking when it comes to actually figuring out what they want because of the abuse they suffered in school or the family unit. sorry for the additional text wall btw i just didnt feel like i made a certain thing clear
@ZiaNitori i agree and disagree with a fair amount of things you've said here but i think these last two posts i disagree with most heavily. i don't really see us hashing it out here, so i see no point in saying how i see things. i appreciate you for sharing your mind on this.
@exiliaex one more small thing for clarification with language, while it's definitely not entirely accurate i see religious behaviors as people trying to vibe out how to fit themselves and others into the body of the state and will illustrate religious thinking as something that is motivated by this end, though i'm aware that its probably more precise to consider even my own strong beliefs as something you could still categorize as fundamentally theological but i need to look more into older religiosity before i say that with too much confidence