*trying to get a trans girl to get up and do something with her life* you know being condemned to exist is sort of like being locked in a basement
“Time forks perpetually toward innumerable futures. In one of them I am your enemy.”— Jorge Luis Borges, The Garden of Forking Paths
“Who we love and how we love are inherently political. We declare our kinship through our actions and words in both explicit and subtle ways.”—
Alice Wong, “Let’s Recognize Why #AccessIsLove” from Year of the Tiger: An Activist’s Life
(viasmokefalls)
“When I first heard it, from a dog trainer who knew her behavioral science, it was a stunning moment. I remember where I was standing, what block of Brooklyn’s streets. It was like holding a piece of polished obsidian in the hand, feeling its weight and irreducibility. And its fathomless blackness. Punishment is reinforcing to the punisher. Of course. It fit the science, and it also fit the hidden memories stored in a deeply buried, rusty lockbox inside me. The people who walked down the street arbitrarily compressing their dogs’ tracheas, to which the poor beasts could only submit in uncomprehending misery; the parents who slapped their crying toddlers for the crime of being tired or hungry: These were not aberrantly malevolent villains. They were not doing what they did because they thought it was right, or even because it worked very well. They were simply caught in the same feedback loop in which all behavior is made. Their spasms of delivering small torments relieved their frustration and gave the impression of momentum toward a solution. Most potently, it immediately stopped the behavior. No matter that the effect probably won’t last: the reinforcer—the silence or the cessation of the annoyance—was exquisitely timed. Now. Boy does that feel good.”
— Melissa Holbrook Pierson, The Secret History of Kindness (2015)
like just because something exists now, people can only conceive the violence of its removal and not the violence required to create and sustain it
im outside the skincare clinic trying to talk all the baddies with dyke scruff out of electrolysis like a fundamentalist at planned parenthood
Cow urine was the only remedy that monks were allowed to use in early Buddhist communities. And when you think about it, it was correct and normal. If peace is pursued, it can only be achieved by rejecting all that is troublesome, that is, all that man has added to original simplicity. To multiply the remedies is to become its slave. This is not the path to healing or salvation. Nothing reveals our decline better than the spectacle of pharmacy: All the remedies we will want for each of our evils, but none for our essential evil, for the one of which no human invention can cure us.
Notebooks
Emil Cioran
“The Archaic period covers an immense span of time, between the flooding of the Beringia land bridge (which once linked Eurasia to the Americas) around 8000 BC, and the initial adoption and spread of maize-farming in certain parts of North America, down to around 1000 BC. One word, for seven millennia of indigenous history. Archaeologists who first gave the period its name - which is really more of a chronological slap in the face - were basically declaring, ‘this is the period before anything particularly important was happening.’ So when undeniable evidence began to appear that all sorts of important things were indeed happening, and not just in the Mississippi basin, it was almost something of an archaeological embarrassment.”
- The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow
The expectation that every neurotic phenomenon can be cured may, I suspect, be derived from the layman’s belief that the neuroses are something quite unnecessary which have no right whatever to exist.
Freud
baedannotbaeddel-deactivated202:
some of y'all don’t seem to understand that the demonization of fascism/nazism is part of its appeal. the social politics of fascism/nazism spawned from the most uptight, moralistic, and joyless busy bodies democracy had to offer but i guess democracy had to exonerate itself by making fascism and nazism out to be the ultimate evils (and completely alien to the social conservativism organic to democracy)
now fascism and nazism have the appeal of transgression, shock value, and revelry in evil, erotic value where they had none before. fascism was never about “a darkness in man” which needs to be controlled in order to prevent a fascist resurgence, it came from the attempt to control it in the first place. to impose a moral coherence to the world where there is none and commit unmitigated atrocities in order to preserve this illusion
if “leftists” and “anti-fascists” cannot come to terms with this, that the “evil” of fascism is its basic appeal, that moralizing against fascism only strengthens it, fascists will always have recruiting grounds in “dark” subcultures (black metal, occultism/satanism, etc) because they scorn moralizing. obviously many leftists want to eradicate these subcultures, decry them as “fascistic” by default for being anti-moral, even though they’d face little tolerance from a fascist regime for defying the morality of the state or “nation”. other leftists want to claim these subcultures without engaging with their content, and expect that they will accommodate their moralizing and disown the factions who won’t. doing so only isolates themselves from the ideological/philosophical “core”, again leaving it open to fascist infiltration, and again falling into the eradicationist tendency
if we do not want to cede this ground to fascists, we have to accept the slaughter of our sacred cows, scorn those that fascists hold, take the ideologies/philosophies of these subcultures seriously and articulate them in anti-authoritarian, anti-nationalist, and anti-capitalist terms. yes, even those which are unsettling. because fascists already latch onto them. we need to understand and appreciate these subcultures as they truly are, instead of what we wish them to be, from a communist/anarchist perspective
we need to have amoral political analyses and root our positions in what we want for ourselves, not what is “right” or “wrong”. we need to draw from anarchist and communist traditions, histories, etc which likewise scorn moralism, and all the other trappings of secularized Christianity
the failure (and cringe lets be real) of “leftist satanism,” “leftist black metal,” etc comes from basic problems of leftism. leftism attempts to weaponize conventional (i.e. bourgeois) morality against the very social arrangement (bourgeois society) that produces it. and that also completely separates “the left” from any real movement toward communism and anarchy
