The Everett Review

Book reviews and thoughts

[innuendostudios]

Research Masterpost

This is my research list for The Alt-Right Playbook. It is a living document - I am typically adding sources faster than I am finishing the ones already on it. Notes and links below the list. Also, please note this does not include the hundreds of articles and essays I’ve read that also inform the videos - this is books, reports, and a few documentaries.

Legend: Titles in bold -> finished Titles in italics -> partially finished *** -> livetweeted as part of #IanLivetweetsHisResearch (asterisks will be a link) The book I am currently reading will be marked as such.

Media Manipulation & Disinformation Online, by Alice Marwick and Rebecca Lewis Alternative Influence, by Rebecca Lewis The Authoritarians, by Bob Altemeyer*** Eclipse of Reason, by Max Horkheimer Civility in the Digital Age, by Andrea Weckerle The Origins of Totalitarianism, by Hannah Arendt On Revolution, by Hannah Arendt Don’t Think of an Elephant, by George Lakoff The Shock Doctrine, by Naomi Klein How Propaganda Works, by Jason Stanley*** This is an Uprising, by Mark and Paul Engler Neoreaction a Basilisk, by Elizabeth Sandifer This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed, by Charles E. Cobb, Jr. Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me), by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson Healing from Hate, by Michael Kimmel <- (currently reading) The Brainwashing of my Dad, doc by Jen Senko On Bullshit, by Harry Frankfurt The Reactionary Mind, by Corey Robin*** Stamped from the Beginning, Ibram X. Kendi Fascism Today, by Shane Burley Indoctrination over Objectivity?, by Marrissa S. Ballard Ur-Fascism, by Umberto Eco Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, by Lindsay C. Gibson Anti-Semite and Jew, by Jean-Paul Sartre Alt-America, by David Neiwert The Dictator’s Handbook, by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita & Alastair Smith Terror, Love, and Brainwashing, by Alexandra Stein Kaputt, by Curzio Malaparte

Keep reading

[zintersoldier]

white person: *eats chicken tikka masala once* i just…. i feel so connected… to indian culture …. I’m learning to speak islam…. check out my third eye….. chakra

[teaboot]

Every time I see this. Every damn time. I’m immediately sucked back into my fuckin. Fuckin English lit class with Mr. Fuckass McShit. Mr. “Hit the gong to begin class”, “Namaste, Children”, “I wanna go backpacking in India to find my spiritual awakening and also my left burkinstock that I lost during a cedar sauna drum circle” ass bastard. “Do you want to share your poetry with the class to get in touch with your emotions” ass fucker. Mr. “Here’s a photograph of a tribal shaman, describe him using nature words” asshole. Pretentious-ass, condescending motherfucker. “Do you want to tell us about your saddest memory?” “I dunno, sir. Are you giving me an option?” “No.” “Then why are you asking” Every goddamn day. Fuck. “You seem tense.” Oh, I seem tense? I seem tense. Well fuck, Professor Pillsbury, maybe I ‘seem tense’ because I walk into a room on five hours of sleep to the sound of a goddamn brass gong drilling through my brain and your seven-foot-nine, socks-and-sandals-wearing, patchouli-smelling ass immediately gravitates in my direction with some shit like “a tree……… Is a Poem” and I gotta sit here and politely tell you that No I’m Not Comfortable Telling The Class About A Time I Was Emotionally Vulnerable With A Loved One using words that sound like the way the color yellow smells. Maybe I don’t wanna sit in a circle and hold hands with Brittney from Computer Sciences to “align our auras” or some shit. Fuck. Fuuuuuuck. I swear to God, if I wanted to sing ‘kumbaya’ with a smelly old guy with gross facial hair who writes bad porn on the side, I’d go out to the parking lot and share a Hookah with Crazy Dan, the disgraced electrician. What, I don’t wanna do an interpretive dance to represent the spiritual experience of eating Quinoa in a room full of ambivalent preteens and suddenly I’m the ‘troubled youth’ you need to Robin Williams “O Captain My Captain” your way into having a Paternal Bonding Moment powerful enough to Expand My Impressionable Young Mind and Turn My Life Around, you goddamn saint, you? Jesus Fucking Christ. You insufferable jackass. You’re not “Enlightened”, you rolled out of bed and ate half a pot brownie, wrote a sad song about a leaf, and strolled into class to ramble about your Spirit Animal for six hours straight before calling it a day. Holy Jesus goddamned Christ. Fucking Balls, sir. Holy Fucking Balls

[cowboyjimkirk]

This is Beanie Spock, reblog to ward off seasonal depression and ensure a cozy and safe fall/winter! ✨

[webearknits]

The sweater is done!! (please ignore my messy room I’m in the middle of sorting my closet)

[everettaddamsmacleod-blog]

my god I love it so much

[balioc]

Everything has failed every time it’s been tried.

We have not thus far created a society that would inspire a sane person to say, “yep, that’s good enough.”

So at this point it’s still a matter of mixing-and-matching the advantages of previous approaches, plus coming up with bright new ideas.

[klinger4yossarian-deactivated20]

#not sure if this is encouraging or despair inducing I’m an anarchist theoretically but that’s way too optimistic. I know I want everyone to get food, shelter, education, healthcare, safety. I don’t know how we do that, I don’t know how we get there. 

[shabbytigers]

my problem is that I furthermore want people with insulin dependent diabetes to get insulin, people with HER2-positive breast cancer to get Herceptin, people with rheumatoid arthritis to get the DMARDS and methotrexate that keep them up and around vs in wheelchairs and agony, people who need [insert 2025 advance making $TERRIBLEDISEASE curable or manageable here] to get it in due course. those kinds of things can’t be executed among a hundred and fifty neighbors in a commune, they take intensive r&d and complicated supply chain and distribution infrastructure and whole additional support technologies like next gen diagnostics.

capitalism-as-she-is-spoke does not do a great job of getting that stuff distributed, but it demonstrates the ability to roll it out at all, and the idea of trying to reconstruct that capability in its absence by force of wonk gives me the sweats tbh. i don’t of course assume it isn’t possible to do better. maybe market socialism or syndicalism or something would solve for it. the Nordic model pulls this sort of thing off well and would represent a substantial incremental step up from where we are in the US rn. tackling this isn’t in my wheelhouse. but it’s the thing that always gives me pause when I see anarchy discourse at the appealing-memes level.

(I am not at all sympathetic to anprim notions that we should all just learn to do without insulin or the internet or hot water and die gracefully of smallpox and tuberculosis, fuck that evil garbage fire)

[whysperingwoods]

I grew up hearing the phrase “you never stick with anything, what’s the point” a lot. I’ve always been attracted towards seemingly disconnected interests, and gone through phases of being really into something. But eventually my interest would fade and I would move onto something else. 

Or at least that’s always how it’s been phrased for me, by others. Now I realize that my interest for the old thing didn’t fade so much as my interest for something new outshined it, and that’s vastly different. 

I was always made to feel bad about it, with every abandoned endeavour I was told I needed to stop starting things if I wasn’t going to stick with them. I was told I was wasting time and money picking up these random interests and abandoning them after a year. 

So eventually, I stopped picking things up. I told myself “what’s the point, I’m going to give up in a year anyway”. Even worse, I started dismissing every new interest, because I had no way of knowing if my interest was “real” enough or just another passing phase. I stopped trying new things, I stopped looking up stuff that piqued my curiosity, and having chronic depression made it really easy to leave everything on the dirty floor of neglected ideas. The more they piled up, the more depressing it was. All these things that could be nice, but I just can’t take care of them. 

I realize now how bullshit that kind of thinking is. So what if I stopped doing karate after a year? That’s one more year of karate than most people I know. And in that year I learned discipline, I learned to listen to a teacher, something I had never done before in all my years of private education. I learned the true meaning of respect, that it’s something you do out of faith at first and maintain as it’s reciprocated, not something you do blindly and regardless of how you’re treated. 

It gave me the foundation for the determination and grounding I needed to practice yoga. Another year. Not enough to be good at it maybe, but again a year more than most people I know and a year that is not lost, but gained. I learned balance, I learned to listen to my body, I learned how to let go of emotional tightness through physical stretching. 

And then iaido, only a few weeks because I couldn’t afford to keep going. The year of yoga I had done a couple years previous had given me a better starting point than the other newcomers to the class. I already had balance, I had strength in my legs and I had better posture. In those months I learned the importance of precision, the true definition of efficacy, the zen state that is incessant repetition. 

Did I practice long enough to get good at iaido, and yoga, and karate? No. Of course not. It takes years to become proficient and decades to master any of those things, but I learned other skills and those skills were an invaluable part of my growth both spiritually and emotionally. Likewise for my forays into painting, sewing, graphic design, film. I’m a photography student now heading into my second year of school, and every single second of practice I have in those other disciplines has given me more experience in those areas and made learning easier. 

Skills carry over. They intersect and connect in ways that are sometimes unexpected. Nothing is ever lost, experience is never a waste of time or worthless or stupid. Allow your focus to wander, reflect on what you learn, and consider how you can keep using it in other aspects of your life. Stop telling people their interests aren’t worth their time. 

[superherogrl]

‘A jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one’

^^^^The real jack of all trades quote if anyone’s i interested.

[fuckingconversations]

For a week I was super into making LED arrays. 

For a few months I was really into costume makeup. 

For a year I was into sewing clothes

For a few months I was into sculpting and molding and casting

I’ve always had a sustained interest in animals, but the hyperfocus on birds in particular made me very familiar with feather formations. 

Couple months I loved the idea of engineering moving sculptures. 

Add all that together, and hot diggity shit, that’s some SOLID basework for making costumes, cosplay, and other impressive props.

—–

For a week I was into welding and took a welding class.

A year of interest in woodworking and fiddling with the tools means I’m fairly good at that as well. 

Add that to the engineering from earlier and the focus on balance and stable structures means I can make my own furniture - Couches, shelves, desks, just give me the material and tools and I can make it happen. 

—

Brief interest in business law meant two classes taken in college, and an accidental qualification for a business degree. 

Those same classes let me point out some serious litigation bait in a friend’s startup company. 

—-

A wide array of interests means I also have a TON of little nitpicky facts about how the world works, which translates into amazing immersive writing. 

I know how it feels to use a chisel, and the delicate precision of electronics. I know the smell of forests and barns and old yarn being put to use again. The bloody smell of a freshly slaughtered chicken, and the anticipatory fear moments before skydiving. 

The pattern of a bad weld and a good one, and the careful calculation of load bearing walls when building underground.  Anyway, this world is HUGE and really cool. Why on earth would I want to stick to learning ONE thing, when there’s HUNDREDS of THOUSANDS of things I could learn?

[storyplease]

Learn all the things. Satisfy your knowledge dragon. <3

[sewickedthread]

Having a bit of knowledge about a lot of things also means you’re more likely to see connections and overlap. 

[allthingslinguistic]

The International Phonetic Alphabet consonants found in English, with keywords and relevant parts of the mouth highlighted and colour-coded. (Source.) 

[pervocracy]

Pronouncing each of these in sequence is a very strange and amusing physical sensation, and I highly recommend it.

[bbyfggt]

“We will not blame him for the crimes of his ancestors if he relents the royal rights of his ancestors; but as long as he claims their rights, by virtue of descent, then, by virtue of descent, he must shoulder the responsibility for their crimes.”

— Séamas Ó Conghaile, an Edinburgh-born Irish Republican and socialist, on King George V; a sentiment that transcends time. (via tal-eire)

[nh2d-deactivated20220723]

I’ve got to admit, something I really appreciate about Monstrous Regiment is how ambiguous it is with the characters’ sexualities and genders.

Nowadays, people have a tendency to want representation to be clear-cut, which is understandable, because frequently if it’s not the creators will wave a hand and say “no, you’re reading too much into this,” or “no, that was a joke.” But there’s something so… relieving about being able to reread Monstrous Regiment for the umpteenth time and come away from it thinking “Hmm. Jackrum is a trans guy and Mal is a lesbian,” and then the next time come away from it thinking “Nah, Jackrum is a woman who’s more comfortable in traditional male societal roles than female, and Mal is genderfluid.” And all of these interpretations are COMPLETELY valid, with quite a bit to support them from the text.

Now, I’m pretty sure Terry Pratchett wrote it that way because he was an old straight British guy who wasn’t entirely ready to take the plunge of “everyone is a lesbian and/or trans and there can be no questioning it.” I think he wanted queer people to read it and see themselves, while straight people could read it and not notice everyone was queer. Cowardice, of a sort, but I don’t really mind, because frankly? I really really like the whole “you pick what gender and orientation they are, but they’re definitely queer” shtick. It’s open-minded and a breath of fresh air in a way that I am so grateful for, especially as someone who’s sexuality can be filed under ?q?u?e?e?r?.

It’s like a buffet. Pick your own representation. I really like it.

[some-triangles]

There are three major types of spiritual practice: first, reaching the spirit by rewarding the body, through ritual feasting, drug-taking and sex; second, reaching the spirit by denying the body, through fasting, cleansing and purification; and third, by abandoning the physical entirely and attempting to reach the numinous entirely via the life of the mind.   In this essay, entitled “Bed, Bath and Beyond”, I will

[lovecrafts-iranon]

Growing up, I was told from many sources (books, tv, parents, teachers, inspirational quotes) that you should never half ass anything. That in everything you do, you should give your all. Honestly, that’s a recipe for misery and burnout. You need to half ass most things so you have enough ass left to give your whole ass to the things you care about. Or at least I do.

[argumate]

if it’s worth doing, it’s worth half doing!

[foxfairygender]

[everettaddamsmacleod-blog]

The Invention of the Patriarchy - Caliban and the Witch

They include (i) the development of a new sexual division of labor subjugating women’s labor and women’s reproductive function to the reproduction of the work-force; (ii) the construction of a new patriarchal order, based upon the exclusion of women from waged-work and their subordination to men; (iii) the mechanization of the proletarian body and its transformation, in the case of women, into a machine for the production of new workers.

Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch p. 12

I have been thinking about the ‘invention of patriarchy’ ever since it was brought up in the TERF-y public access radio show that caused a stink here in the Madison music scene. It was employed there to explain why trans women were anti-feminist. The invention of the patriarchy rested on control of the reproductive facilities of uterus havers, and so trans-women can not have the same oppression as cis-women, is roughly the argument, or something like that.

(for the time being I will hold my tongue about how, even given that assumed foundation, there still remains no compelling reason why trans women and the variably gender fucked among us are antithetical to feminism, this is perhaps a topic for another day)

To me, it seemed an odd thing to say- patriarchy - invented? Could you say that patriarchy- the cultural system wherein men hold most of the power - was invented? Didn’t it rather evolve via a whole stew of forces over the entire course of human history? 

I suspect there is a lot of history I need to learn.

I went to engineering school. The history I have formally studied involves Fred Taylor and the Gilbreths.

In the above quote from Federici, she is building up to her thesis for Caliban and the Witch, and here specifically laying out where her analysis of primitive accumulation differs from Marx. I find myself in a similar vein of thought as before. I can see this thesis aligning with the TERFs at least in some respect, and I’m back to the idea of inventing patriarchy.

(again, I really don’t think this point actually leads to where the TERFs think it does, but what do I know)

I don’t know here if Federici is implying that the new patriarchal order is new in the sense of ‘there was not one before’, or that it is new in the sense that it is different to the one it replaced. I’m currently on page 12. I suspect the latter but am suspect of the former. I suppose you can make a distinction between a past, feudal patriarchy and the current, as hooks would call it, IMPERIALIST WHITE SUPREMACIST CAPITALIST PATRIARCHY and I suppose that it is a useful exercise and distinction. 

It’s unlikely that Federici has a simplistic argument here, so I’m really into seeing where this goes. 

I suspect where and how and when oppression twisted out of social forces is a complicated tale, and I am wary of ascribing grand narratives and intent to it. We can only construct models of the past, and all models are lies.

But, as the saying goes, some are useful.

As a side note, this book is dove-tailing nicely with the Ostrom - Governing the Commons, what with the enclosures. I think I will have to study this history further, and be sure to grab various interpretations. I wonder if Mcloskey has anything on it.

Another side note: 12 pages in and I’ve already noticed that I have to read carefully for when the word “reproduction” refers to economic/social reproduction and when it refers more to plain old makin babies.

[everettaddamsmacleod-blog]

Career Planning while in Pain

What are you good at?

if I have ever been good at anything, someone please tell me.

I managed a good gpa on an engineering degree but Im really not sure how. I think I might hate math these days.

I am currently a data analyst.

 I can hack it with R, SPSS, Python, tableau, etc and your basic statistical methods but I haven’t pulled the fancy stuff out in a while.  

random people sometimes compliment my voice at open mics.

I can make a pretty good curry despite not being able to digest onions.

I can get lost in a research hole for days

I probably shouldnt include that last one because generally I only do it while procrastinating

I can get to a basic level of competency in most musical instruments given about a month

I read fast

one of my coworkers makes me write her change control justifications because she found it reduced the approval time substantially

...sadly, and with great shame, I must admit I am good with excel. And with more shame, Microsoft Access.

What do you want in a career?

Health insurance.

Financial backing to obtain access to the highly engineered enzymes that allow my legs to walk and my hands to type.

Enough flexibility so that, despite the miracles of modern medicine, periods when I still can’t walk, I still can’t type, I still can’t stay awake for more than 10 hours or sleep more than 4, I still can’t think well enough to put thoughts into words, I do not become homeless.

Health insurance.

Something that doesn’t make me resent the time spent on it

The ability to pursue intellectual and musical interests

let me learn stuff

my brain to feel like my own and not a prisoner of other peoples desires

a feeling that I matter

health insurance

What are you bad at?

god, everything

talking to people.

being around people.

puts me in a constant state of anxiety and its fucking exhausting

making deadlines

doing things when I dont wanna

staying awake

writing down numbers in the right order. They always get twisted up.

focusing with my brain

focusing with my eyes

walking - its the arthritis, see

breathing - thats the asthma. possibly also the anxiety.

holding objects for longer than 15 seconds

digesting onions

remembering things

asking for help. Especially when I have to ask from people

standing up for myself

standing up

standing up for others

sitting down

What do you not want in a career?

To talk to people

racist co-workers

the sinking realization that its never going to get better

this is the best physical condition Im going to get and I have to spend it like this

arthritis hands, man. they’re going to happen and then I will die

my first hip replacement will happen when Im 35

and then they’ll have to keep happening

I’ll be wheelchair bound at some point

I’m just going to have to spend my entire life working for other people so I don’t dissolve into an immovable pile of twitching pain

at what point does being an immovable pile of twitching pain sound like the better option

only having brief glimpses of an existence outside of work after I’ve been able to decompress enough to breathe again just in time to go back

having to talk to people

I dont have any choice in these things do I

[fyphysica]

If one remembers this particular episode from the popular sitcom ‘Friends’ where Ross is trying to carry a sofa to his apartment, it seems that moving a sofa up the stairs is ridiculously hard.

But life shouldn’t be that hard now should it?

The mathematician Leo Moser posed in 1966 the following curious mathematical problem: what is the shape of largest area in the plane that can be moved around a right-angled corner in a two-dimensional hallway of width 1? This question became known as the moving sofa problem, and is still unsolved fifty years after it was first asked.

The most common shape to move around a tight right angled corner is a square.

And another common shape that would satisfy this criterion is a semi-circle.

But what is the largest area that can be moved around?

Well, it has been conjectured that the shape with the largest area that one can move around a corner is known as “Gerver’s sofa”. And it looks like so:

Wait.. Hang on a second

This sofa would only be effective for right handed turns. One can clearly see that if we have to turn left somewhere we would be kind of in a tough spot.

Prof.Romik from the University of California, Davis has proposed this shape popularly know as Romik’s ambidextrous sofa that solves this problem.

Although Prof.Romik’s sofa may/may not be the not the optimal solution, it is definitely is a breakthrough since this can pave the way for more complex ideas in mathematical analysis and more importantly sofa design.

Have a good one!

[eltiron-deactivated20180910]

Spec. nekem erről Dirk Gently ugrik be, nem a Friends :)

[everettaddamsmacleod-blog]

On Deck: Against The Fascist Creep

Full disclosure: I’ve actually already finished this and just haven’t sat down to write out anything about it. 

It’s kind of a lot, this book. In many ways.

The first chapter, at least, should probably be required reading for anyone looking to understand the origins and foundations of fascism. I mean, the rest of the book is also very enlightening and what have you, but it’s info-dump nature started to warp my brain in somewhat distressing ways. I wonder if it would be better to approach each section independently, though the web that gets woven by Ross does have a lot of connective tissue between sections, and one of the biggest impressions this book left me with was the overall scope, breadth, and continuity of fascist movements throughout the last century and a bit. Its just that I ended up a little, well...

NAZIS, NAZIS EVERYWHERE OH MY GOD.

It wasn’t great for my mental health, is what I’m saying. 

I think on the whole this is a better work of scholarship than Fascism Today by Shane Burley, but I’d still probably recommend reading FT if you could only pick one, or at least start with that. It will at least acclimate you to some of the deluge of names and groups that AtFC goes through by the truck load, and it does it a little more gently. I got interested in AtFC via the citations in FT, and sure enough, Burley’s other work shows up in the citations of AtFC. There’s a lot of shared ground between the two, though FT has an emphasis on the more recent stuff (as is suggested by the title). 

I do wonder a bit about insular groups of people working from shared sets of facts, though. Are Ross and Burley (and possible others) just parroting each other’s ideas and assumptions without wading far enough into the fascist circles to know if what they see as the influential nodes of connection are in fact influential? For what it’s worth, I did spend a little while in r/DebateFascism to see if I could pick up any of the threads- and I was surprised at how much did in fact line up with whats in these books. It was at least some amount of confirmation. But I would be interested in how they are conducting research - a methods section might be nice in books like these.

Side note, spending time in r/DebateFascism probably isn’t good for the mental health, either. 

I might end up diving deeper into the topic of the propagation of fascism because lord knows I can fall down that rabbit hole. In all honesty, there’s a bit of ‘there but for the grace of god go I’ fascination at play. But I might also try to focus on things more productive, actionable, and better for my mental health. 

[telepathine2-deactivated2018050]

saying that some people can never get better and stop being abusive is a fractal of carceral justice- there are not “bad” or “evil” people, nor people who have been broken by civilization beyond repair. that mentality is what keeps people locked up in prison or civilly committed for decades, because they “can never get better”. to deny someone the chance to change is to deny them their humanity. you dont have to be around for it, but to pretend it’s impossible for them to change is frankly cop logic and it’s not consistent with my views on autonomy and plasticity of the human mind. 

[telepathine2-deactivated2018050]

I would like to add the context out of which my view on this was formed. i am a lawyer and i work with incarcerated populations- people who are facing criminal charges, people who are currently incarcerated, and people who have been incarcerated and are now out.

first of all, prison is torture, full stop. prisons are the most hopeless pits of misery i have ever set foot in. as soon as you walk in, you hear screaming and banging on bars of cells. and it goes on for hours, and hours, and hours. the stench is also intense because prisoners are often not allowed to shower for days or even weeks. the prisoners themselves, when i spoke to them, were dead eyed or trying not to break down sobbing. i’ve read over a thousand letters from prisoners, detailing the food (not nearly enough, crawling with bugs and mold) the abuse (the guards and other prisoners taunt them, rape them, beat them, etc.) the complete lack of autonomy, the constant disrespect, having their few possessions fucked with, their legal papers thrown around their cells, their shit broken, prisoners in wheelchairs being dumped on the ground and laughed at, prisoners having to sit in their own piss and shit for hours, people who have been locked in solitary confinement for the last ten years, gratuitous pepper spraying, only being allowed to go outside once a week in a dog cage, ripping out your own eyes and stomping on them because confinement really can drive some people to horrible acts of self mutilation, getting your medical care in a dirty shower stall on a ripped up old athletic equipment, I really could go on forever. faced with that staggering amount of sheer misery and pain, i realized that nothing could be worth that. no one, regardless of what they did, deserved to be isolated and tortured, especially not for the rest of their lives.

the idea that someone can’t change is what makes cops and judges and prison guards feel justified in locking up people and torturing them. one of the scariest examples of this is the civil commitment of “Sexually Dangerous Persons” or SDPs. Civil commitment is the post sentence institutional detention of an offender with the intention of preventing further offenses. in my state, after you commit a sex crime, you serve your sentence and then you are civilly committed and confined indefinitely. It could literally be for the rest of your life because a judge might decide that you aren’t safe to be around other people. forever.

if you’ve been convicted of a felony, you are now a “felon” in the eyes of law enforcement. if you are arrested again, your sentence will be even harsher because you are a tainted person in the eyes of the law. even if you’re never arrested again, life gets so much harder for you. i’ve had clients come to me to try to get their criminal records sealed so they can get a better job or get better housing and i can’t help them because only a handful of low level felonies can be sealed in my state. i’ve seen so many people break down crying, saying “it’s not fair! i committed that crime twenty years ago. i’m a different person now. is this really going to follow me for the rest of my life?” or “i’m a different person” or memorably, once “you’re a different person every ten years” and my answer to them has to be yes, because carceral justice demands a life sentence.

carceral justice and civilization go hand in hand. in our civilized society, you don’t intrinsically have rights- you are allowed to have rights. if you violate the law, those rights are taken away from you. Stirner addresses this- he says “The thief and the human being are in some minds irreconcilable opposites, because one is not truly human when one is a thief; one degrades the human being or ‘humanity’ in himself when he steals. Falling outside of personal concern, one gets into philanthropy, human kindness, which is usually misunderstood as if it were a love for human beings, for each individual, whereas it is nothing but a love for the human being, the fictitious concept. It is not human beings but The Human Being that the philanthropist carries in his heart. Of course, he is concerned about every individual, but only because he wants to see his beloved ideal actualized everywhere”. I don’t want to place that ideal on everyone. Human beings deserve love and friendship and a chance to change and grow. I don’t want to deny someone that humanity because they’ve failed the ideal that our Christian society has placed upon them.

“Falling out of personal concern” is the most interesting part of Stirner’s quote to me. He asks us why it’s our business if someone commits a crime against someone else that we don’t know or care about. When someone violates the Human Ideal, it becomes everyones business to shame or punish that person. This is the bedrock of mob justice, which has been institutionalized, (whether leviathanized human beings want to recognize it or not) into the justice system.

The justice system as we know it functions because there are certain attitudes that are ubiquitous in civilized society that allow maintain and allow it to flourish. One of them, as I have said above, is the refusal to allow people a chance to change. Another is the thirst we have to Punish people. Punishment cannot exist without domination. In striving to live a dominance free life, it’s important to also try to live a punishment free one. It is impossible to inflict punishment on someone without dominating them and forcing the punishment on them. And to what end? People still hurt and kill and rape and abuse each other. It isn’t going to help a violent person to be imprisoned or isolated from their community. Denying them their humanity or human connection or material comforts won’t make them a “better person.” Retribution is not and will never be resolution.

Even if retribution is dealt outside of the carceral system itself, it is still the product of carceral logic, i.e. that this person is Bad and needs to be Punished for the Safety of the Good People. That’s how we get call outs and vicious rumors and social isolation of “wrongdoers”. That is, as i said before, cop logic. That is the exact same line of thinking that puts people in prison. It has bled into our interpersonal relationships. The other important similarity between carceral logic and it’s fractals is who it affects. the people it affects the most or the people “most likely to be brought to justice” are those affected by transmisogyny and white supremacy. these are two of the pillars civilization is built on and it completely follows that civilized justice comes down hardest on the bodies we perceive as the “most threatening.” even if the person isn’t imprisoned, they can be isolated, and for many people, social connections are necessary to survival. by branding someone as too dangerous for anyone to be around, we can be condemning them to death, or a life that looks a lot like it- a life spent alone, afraid, and isolated.

Finally, I also want to say this- acts of violence are fucking scary. no one wants to be hurt. everyone deserves to live free of free of physical violence. but if i’ve learned anything in my time working with prisoners, it’s that shit happens. it’s easy to pretend we’re all perfectly civilized and would never do anything “like that” but can’t you dig deep and remember a time where you really lost control? Wouldn’t you want compassion and understanding, the chance to try to be better? What if your behavior you deeply regretted fell on the other side of unacceptable and you had to accept a life sentence of Evilness that followed you everywhere you went? There is so much more to any situation than “this person is evil”. Civilization demands we control our bodies, our impulses, our sexualities so we can sit and work and be productive. To demand that kind of perfect self control under threat of lifelong punishment is a symptom of civilization that is hurting and isolating so many people.

victims don’t ever have to forgive someone who hurt them. i’ll probably never forgive my abusers. but i refuse to believe that they are doomed to being abusive forever. i never, ever want to see them again, and i think that’s ok, but abusers are abusers because some really bad shit happened to them. it’s completely possible that they can heal and grow and have healthy relationships. they won’t get that chance if they are subjected to large scale call out justice or the carceral system. i want them to have that chance because i would want to have that chance, and i want my clients to have that chance, and i want anyone who can feel love and pain and rage and loneliness and happiness to have that chance. i want to reject cop logic, the suffocating idea of the ideal human being, and resolve conflict in a way that doesn’t involve lifelong stigma and isolation.