It’s funny, I had never heard of her before I clicked on this video a few weeks ago. About 20 mins I noticed the length and was like, “I’m never going to watch four hours.” Then I did. And then I’ve been watching a lot of her other videos. She’s funny. And her ideas are really good. How no one has hired her to work for development after the kind of stuff she manages to spit out in a random YouTube video is actually a little surprising.

A cop pointed a gun at Aaron Bushnell as he collapsed while burning to death. The cops have a trigger happiness problem. They don’t know how to handle themselves around guns. The acorn thing wasn’t an outlier at all. It was just the most fucking absurd example of an ongoing problem. First sign of trouble means they’re ready to shoot someone—and because they’re told they need to avoid lawsuits for injuring people, that means they’re ready to fucking kill at the first sign of trouble.

Don’t protect the major retailer. Who screwed you

Well if they didn’t shoot your dog, it doesn’t even sound like these were cops at all. Are you sure it wasn’t the burglars who came back for the vase they couldn’t take the first time around?

That’s because there is no such thing as a unified “ACAB crowd.” It’s turned into a catch-all used by people from full on abolitionists to liberals upset over specific events. In reality, ACAB is an abolitionist phrase. If all cops are bastards, the entire concept of policing as we know it is flawed and needs to be done away with.

That’s the problem with catchy phrases spreading over the internet: they lose all meaning.

“They’re close to almost making this seem like something that would resemble a fair fight if you squint in the dark and you had cataracts. It’s unconscionable!”

But can’t crappy design be mildly infuriating

Stuff they don’t want you to know was good years ago. I haven’t listened in a while though.

In other news: …there’s an asteroid set to collide with earth?!?

“Lol. Um, what.”

• capitalists

Are they outside of Asheville? Wicked weeds? Because I know they got bought by Budweiser and Asheville was up in arms

If it helps, just flip the perspective a little:

“Area friends unaware of seemingly ‘aimless’ personal friend’s innate ability to buck capitalist expectations and live free of strain from others’ expectstions”

For a long time, when I was working shitty retail and service industry jobs, I would vacillate between feeling self-conscious when talking to married friends about their kids and their new property, feeling like I was “failing” because I was still working in the service industry and between being content in mostly doing whatever I wanted with my life.

I’m still dating long after these feelings first came about—after my friends got married and sent their kids off to school. I do now have a job that, while still requiring no commitment to climbing some bullshit corporate structure/filling out everyone’s basic checklist of “success” in this backwards-thinking late capitalist hellscape, is interesting to outsiders.

I live my life, I’m happy. But my life is still pretty atypical when held up to, say, my brother’s life—he’s been married, has worked steady office jobs, and after getting divorced stays in long-term relationships. I have nothing against it. In fact, he’s happy and I’m glad. But we’re different people. I don’t know if I’d be happy in his situation—at least not at this point in my life.

The concept of “succeeding” in regards to the system under which we are forced to live is a stupid capitalist illusion that only serves to force people into being the most beneficial for the system itself. “Success” isn’t measured by what’s most beneficial to us as humans—we aren’t more fulfilled by thriving under this weird, self-serving system. We just “succeed” in relation to ITS principles and expectations. And to see that as the only “success” is nothing more than intense conditioning and an inability to extricate the rules and norms of capitalism from actual human existence. And that’s why the system keeps “working.” But it’s becoming more and more clear as this runaway train barrels straight toward a cliff edge that we need new ways of thinking. Because the capitalist way is insane. It’s just done a really, really great job of convincing us otherwise.

But it IS insane. We get one life. To be forced to waste it thinking of our jobs and our possessions and our usefulness to markets as the markers of a life well-lived is a true fucking travesty. Here’s to you, Adam Tessler. You’re a goddamn hero. Fuck your judgemental friends.

Here’s to a life in praise of idleness.

…huh?

Hey! That’s not fair!!

He wants to make selling human organs legal. That’s…a policy.

On social issues, he wants to loosen gun laws, abolish abortion - which was legalised in Argentina in 2020 - and allow the sale and purchase of human organs.

Nah, man. I’m just an adult. I have my principles. And casting a single vote, I’m still sure what my principles are. And they don’t align with the Democratic Party.

But while there are two harmful options, one is significantly more harmful to populations of people whose very existence is apparently up for debate, friends of mine who I see struggle every day—also anarchist, but transgender (…who have also decided to give up a little of their pride in their stringent ideals in order to not be made illegal or to keep younger trans kids from suffering the way they did growing up in the 90s/early 2000s), opened my eyes to the urgency of the situation for them.

I didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton. Obama didn’t get my vote either time. But I did vote for joe Biden. I didn’t love it. But I did it. It didn’t take too long, and I continued living my principles. I didn’t burst into flames.

I’ve voted third party most of my life. And I’ve wavered on this as I’ve gone through my life. I make a judgement call when I can. But I started reading anarchist literature young. Like I said, I came of age under late Clinton/bush II. So my radicalization happened early. And my proactivity in my beliefs has come and gone. But my principles have stayed the same. I dunno how old you are, but honestly, I’m assuming you’re kinda young based on the way you speak. I was cooking for FNB and burning American flags and spray painting banks and paint bombing Lockheed Martin longer than you seem to have been alive.

I think of my taking a few minutes to cast a ballot against a genuine fascist movement like harm reduction in drug addiction. I don’t support drug addiction, but I do want to help those at the mercy of the worst of it. Drug addiction is horrible. Our electoralism is horrible. I don’t want to support either. But there is a little I can do to reduce the harm to most vulnerable victims of both.

I’m secure enough in my beliefs and can still be a full-fledged anarchist doing my praxis and casting a vote. My beliefs aren’t so flimsy that I need to PROVE TO EVERYONE IM ABOVE IT. I’ve been there. I can still see the problems inherent in our system while casting a vote. I can still hate capitalism while working and spending money. It’s not the system we want. My beliefs are lived through my praxis and my sense of what I believe. Not by what I DONT do. Electoralism will still exist if you vote or not. Not participating in the vote doesn’t do shit to electoralism. You not voting won’t help the Palestinians. My voting won’t help them either, as we both agree. But there are people in my direct vicinity and in my life and in this country that I MIGHT have the off-chance of keeping from harm by sacrificing my own sense of “purity as an anarchist.” The electoral system doesn’t live nor die by my vote. To think that way is beyond self-centered.

Lol you really didn’t read what I said, huh?

I get the concept. I do. And I wrestle with the notion myself, as I’m an anarchist (you and I don’t agree on a few things, lemmygrad friend).

But I don’t subscribe to the notion that not voting as a principled abstainer is a righteous act…I don’t think. Because I do agree, of course. The democrats are capitalist, war-mongering shitheels. They aren’t “good” or just or righteous by any stretch of the imagination. They destroy the environment and will kill us if we challenge the status quo of lte stage consumer capitalism. I have no illusions about this.

But doing nothing in the face of a Republican Party that is hellbent on wiping trans people from the face of the earth, strapping us all to the whipping chair until they can establish a Christofascist nightmare in which we are all beaten into straight, white submission is…not a heroic act. Because, yeah, the democrats support Israel, they are neoliberal capitalist pigs. They boost police budgets whenever they can, they take obscene amounts of money from special interests and work for them, not for us. But the republicans do all the same shit PLUS hating trans and gay people and pass laws that make it so they can lock you away for protesting and they are clearly more “business friendly” because they can be open about it while the democrats have to do slightly less because their rhetoric and their base don’t approve like Republican voters do.

My point is, there are two terrible options. Yes, we are in agreement. And yes, electoralism is bullshit, incrementalism will get us nowhere. But hierarchy is bullshit. Capitalism is bullshit. These things will exist until some insanely devastating event upturns the way the world has run for a long time.

Not voting won’t change these realities. VOTING won’t change them. But all the people that are hurt by an emboldened xenophobe and vicious bigot WILL be hurt. Actual, measurable hurt. PLUS the Palestinian people you’re basing your position on will continue to be killed. Because the US supports Israel. Not the democrats or republicans, but the US.

Not voting against a party that is openly using REAL LIFE fascist methods and speech so you can maintain your perceived purity isn’t noble.

We can all hate capitalism. But we’re stuck with it right now. We can all hate electoralism. But we’re stuck with it right now. Capitalism kills way more people than the genocide currently happening in Palestine. But you’re way more involved with it than you would be in electoralism by casting one vote.

These things are truths right now. You’d do a lot more good (or at least contribute A LOT less hurt) by abstaining from capitalism than you would abstaining from electoralism. We can all be principled. But all-or-nothing-ism that is rampant on “the left” (read: in modern people with principles and humanity and half a brain) isn’t noble because it helps. It’s perceived as noble because you can say, “pfft. I didn’t _____.” You’re not helping anymore but yourself.

Engage in praxis. Fight for your beliefs. But when your abstinence will be weaponized by insanely powerful and horrible people, and leveraged against minority groups, your “purity” is nothing but self-aggrandizement.

Not voting against anti-trans Christian fascist bigots is a huge show of privilege.

…what anti-capitalist do you think you’re voting into office?

I dunno about the vinyl parallel. I’m a physical book reader myself—I’ve tried an ebook, I read a few books on there. But it didn’t hold me the way books know how to. Just right.

Not to mention, I’m trying everything I can to realistically separate myself from the “internet of things.” I use the internet, but I try to achieve as private of an experience as I can manage. I’m wary of cameras these days. I never used social media. I cover any camera pointed at me that I can…my point is, a book doesn’t know I’m reading it or how long I’ve read it. Buying used books, no one knows who I am, how long I’ve spent reading, WHAT I’m reading, etc.

I can’t say the same about these e-readers. I don’t need ANOTHER device I’m constantly worried is stealing every single metric it can possibly gather about me.

Give them away! I have a bunch of books on my shelf, my friend asked me, “how many of those have you even read?” And I said, probably around half of them. He scoffed. As if I were just buying books…for the look? I dunno. But all of my previously read books get “loaned out” and never return. Which is fine! Plenty of people have lent me books that I never returned. It’s the circle of life.

My whole family has tried getting me on e-readers because I’ve always been the reader of the family, but…I read a few books on it and then never used it again. It was fine, but I love my physical books. When I was traveling overseas for a few years, I had like six books in my bag. Which, yeah, maybe an e-reader would’ve been smarter at that point, but every single book I was reading I gave to someone to enjoy when I finished. And people gave me books when I finished mine! It’s such a great system. I also love shopping for used books…that part may be a bit of an addiction lol