Defenestrations

A revolutionary work in progress. Welcome to the garden, everything here is canonical. Don’t be the dumpster fire, be the fart that blows the lid off. Love you—mean it.

[jayarrarr]

If you’re feeling froggy, hop on over to Weaponized Empathy and do a subscribey type thing. It’ll be fun 🐸

[jayarrarr]

Decolonizing your mind and deconstructing the reality the system has created around you is a lifelong process, and this is a statement that turns ppl off bc it sounds like never-ending struggle. It sounds like endless frustration, a diagnosis of chronic self-inflicted Debbie Downerism, but that’s only bc you’ve never experienced unconflicted joy. Like unconditional love, unconflicted joy is all-consuming bc it doesn’t require you to first dispense w critical thinking. Start by asking yourself what emotion a claim is appealing to and what it is a person wants to trigger in you. Emotions are not signs of weakness; they are your mind-body’s first line of defense, they arise without thought in reaction to a stimulus. The system you live under tells you to ignore the ones that threaten it, the ones that call it into question. The system tells you they’re weak bc it wants you to worship at the altar of strength. The system was built through coercive force and domination; accordingly, the only emotions it approves of are anger and fear. Anger reinforces the system itself and fear is the only appropriate response to that system. All the rest are relegated.

Confronting your fear is likely to piss you off just like someone else pointing out your fear makes you defensive. From the heart of your fear you desperately fling “I’m not scared—you are” and hope it sticks. Know that it’s not your fault, that the system was never designed to work for you, that the system was designed to kill you, at worst. At best, the system is entirely apathetic to your existence. You might start to wonder why tf you bother to uphold something that ain’t doing you any good. Take a brick off the wall.

If someone tells you to be disgusted by something, what they’re really doing is telling you to be afraid of it—afraid of contamination. The system loves the language of contagion bc it uses your fear to increase the distance between you and anything that might cause you to question the system. The system knows your disgust will gradually grow into hate and from that hate new fears will blossom. The system depends on your inability to dissect those fears and understand what put them there and what makes them tick. As you start unpacking, you take down a brick, and another, and another.

The system doesn’t want this. The system depends on your belief that it is natural and right and proper and good. Eventually the brick you take down will be load-bearing. The system will collapse and you’ll finally see the sun. It starts w a simple question, the one adults get pissed at toddlers for asking repeatedly: WHY. Why lays the system bare. Why causes the causeway to crumble and reveals a different path—one that’s a little bit messier but a lot more fun.

[jayarrarr]

I’m not fond of generational politics—I feel like ppl try to say too much w it—but it can be beneficial in understanding trends that do occur on a generational level, as in parents teaching their children based on their understanding of the world and what they’ve experienced. So I wanna talk to my fellow Gen Xers for a moment. Xennials, this likely applies to you too. Everybody else feel free to read along.

Our parents were Baby Boomers, so called bc when WWII was over a bunch of vets came home and started getting busy. This wasn’t (just) bc they came home horny, it was bc folks in America had hope for the future. They were going to college in record numbers, buying houses in record numbers, achieving the so-called American Dream in record numbers, and so on. Our parents were born into that. Their parents had survived at least one if not two world wars and the Great Depression. Their country was selling a particular type of prosperity rooted in consumption so our parents, a lot of them, got to be the first “kids”—little ppl w zero responsibility except to play and learn and grow. Our country created the “middle class” and told them they were in it. Our parents also became the first “teenagers”—young adults w zero responsibility except to play and learn and grow. Our parents, some of them, started to see the cracks in the foundation their country was trying to build, and they pointed to them. The government, largely consisting of ppl their parents’ age, called them hippies and gangsters and criminals, said they had too much time on their hands, said they were “soft.” They had all been taught to fear communism. Not all of them did. Those who didn’t were killed, jailed, and silenced. They came of age in the middle of a war waged by colonial forces against the will of a native ppl and they lost. Their parents despised them for losing.

For most of our adult lives, our parents have run the government for the benefit of capitalists. They raised us, as Gen Xers, to understand that economics and politics are two separate things (spoiler alert: they’re not), bc if we saw them as necessarily intertwined we might start to see the cracks in the foundation they were building, just as they saw the cracks in the foundation their parents were building. Our bogie man was a Commie w vodka breath who would come for us bc he was jealous of our way of life, us w our 24 hours of television and our 24 varieties of sugary breakfast cereal and our 24 million fast food burgers. They rebranded capitalism as freedom and Protestant work ethic as entrepreneurial spirit. The heroes of our grandparents’ generation were government and military leaders; our parents pedestalled CEOs w relentless drive.

The predominant attitude of Gen X was apathy; rebellion was repackaged in sarcastic cynicism. We knew the adults were full of shit; all we could do was snark abt it from the corner of a sneer. The Boomers did not raise a generation of activists and I’ve come to believe this was intentional. Not conscious on an individual level, but intentional on a generational level.

The Boomers are the gift that was promised to their parents in exchange for their sacrifices, and the Boomers made good on that promise. They stand testament to the truth of the American Dream as long as they stand, which is why so many of them can’t seem to fucking retire. They taught us that success comes through hard work and they are incredulous of the reality we face. In their minds, we’ve all had the same opportunities as billionaires (yes, “opportunities” does a lot of heavy lifting, both in discourse and in reality)—the fact we’re not all billionaires must surely come down to some personal fault.

Those of us who have internalized the individualist consumerist mindset of our parents are cursed w guilt when our American Dream does not materialize. We look inward, as we were trained to do. We go to therapy and read self-help books bc we are convinced that fixing ourselves is the key that will crack the padlock on the door to success. Those of us who’ve managed to secure a slice of the American Pie for ourselves remain fraught w insecurity, convinced that if we change even one thing we do, our entire empire will crumble like the sand it’s surely built of.

Our parents raised critical commentators convinced any effort to fight back is essentially futile, that the best we can hope for is that our snarky social media quip goes viral. The few who positioned themselves to inspire hope squandered it. Our parents’ generation destroyed all vestiges of community in the name of fighting the Red Menace and taught us, their kids, that strength meant not needing anybody else, that there was shame in asking for help.

Our parents told us they’d solved all the problems of the world, that the only thing left for us to do was stack paper. And there’s still some of y’all who believe that. Look around—it’s a fucking lie. And you know who sees that really fucking clearly? Your kids.

Just like we knew our parents were full of shit, our kids know we’re full of shit. The difference is our full-of-shittedness is based in powerlessness, and our kids are waking up to the reality that we are not powerless. The powerlessness is a game we were playing to let the capitalists stack paper in the mistaken belief that some of that confetti would rain down on us, all the while blind to the fact that the windows on the billionaires’ lofts are sealed.

This moment is bigger than any of us. We are living in unprecedented times for a reason. The contradiction of capitalism can no longer hold. Y’all wanna act like nothing’s ever gonna change when all the shit you see as natural and permanent hasn’t even existed a hundred fucking years. You have the opportunity to do something really fucking awesome. You have the opportunity to literally save humanity, but you’d rather sit on a couch and heh-heh heh-heh. Think you know it all so you don’t need to listen. Think you work hard so you don’t need to fight. Think nobody ever gave you a hand so you don’t need to reach out to anyone else.

If you own your own home and you’ve never had to worry abt if you’re gonna be able to keep the power on or eat tomorrow, you’re lucky. Not smart, not hard-working, not deserving, not even blessed—fucking lucky. Some of us aren’t content to live in a society where basic human needs are left to a dice roll w weighted dice that will always advantage the system. We don’t want a new dealer, we want to start playing a new game.

And listen—a lot of this ain’t your fault and I’m not saying it is. I went to the same schools you did, watched the same MTV, listened to the same bands. If I can see it, that means you can see it too. The America you were taught to believe in doesn’t exist and it never did. It never stood for the principles you were taught to value and uphold. It’s ok to mourn that—learning Santa Claus isn’t real can be tough, but it wasn’t so tough that you didn’t grow up and tell the same lie to your kids. And you shield a toddler from the truth the same way our parents shielded us from the truth abt America.

I’m not doing it anymore. I’m done playing winky games abt this shit. This is real, and it pisses me tf off that y’all wanna sit there and talk abt culture wars and movies and restaurants and aesthetic like loreless sycophants. Your life is not more valuable than anybody else’s, nor are your acquisitions more precious. Nobody makes it out of this alive. It’s time for y’all to step off the sidelines.

[anexperimentallife]

Can you hear the people sing?

[jayarrarr]

Houston too

[jayarrarr]

Fascists love to worship at the altar of cleanliness. Their ideal cityscape teems w liminal lifelessness. Their lives are a constant fight against humanity itself bc humans, like all animals, are messy. Life is messy. Love is messy. Learning is messy.

Remember: ain’t nothing clean unless a human expended the effort to go clean it. A fashface will tell you animals don’t clean up after themselves but humans do, that this is what separates us and makes us higher. Cleanliness is next to godliness. The humans who live in what they see as squalor are not better than animals. They have the power and the right to control those ppl.

None of that is true, by the way. Animals clean up after themselves, especially if they don’t want a predator to follow them, or if they don’t want their prey to catch wind of them. And their idea of cleanliness is something ideal and unnatural, something that separates them from the Earth, which is dirty. If you’re wondering, that impetus goes alllllllllllllllll the way back to the dawn of this “Western Civilization” that fascists tend to think of as the be-all and end-all of human existence.

You can see it in their images, which are all ai. You can see it in their idealized future, which is always as clean as it is silent on who cleaned it and how they live. You can see it in the demands they make on themselves and each other.

They hate creativity bc it’s messy. They hate the creative process bc it’s messy, bc you have to fuck around and try new shit to see what works, you have to be willing to make something ugly to find its beauty. You ask me, this is the main reason fascist movements always lose—they strive for something unachievable. They imagine themselves gods and then get smacked upside the face w reality. The cognitive dissonance that’s festering in their own minds will eventually explode, and it won’t be pretty when it does.

They look at images like this one and go “eww.” They make jokes abt the diseases you might get. They are afraid of folks who look like this and they mask their fear w disgust. They look down their wrinkled noses as they talk abt eradication and gain power by convincing folks to be afraid of each other. The main thing they’re afraid of is dying, which is the one and only thing everyone as a human must do. The other thing they’re afraid of in the meantime is that they’re not seen as better than other people. They believe in the right to conquer and impose their will on others. Their freedom entails a freedom from, not a freedom to. They can’t imagine a world in which we all embrace each other as siblings, but I can—and I bet you can too.

[jayarrarr]

This is for the folks who think when you equate generativeAI w fascism you’re overstating the truth:

Listen, y’all—I was born and raised and spent all but 3 years of my adult life in the South. Hyperbole is a southerner’s favorite mode of communication. We never met a fish that couldn’t be bigger nor a tale that couldn’t be taller. As Mark Twain once said, “never let the truth get in the way of a good story.”

The difference ofc is that this isn’t a “good” story. The reason generativeAI is coming after artists and creatives first is that fascists hate creativity. They despise it. They need to control the vision of the future so they can paint a bleak and fearful picture and get folks to cower behind them, and those of us who still have the compunction to think for ourselves get in the way of that, bc alternate visions of the future sow seeds of doubt and there is no room for doubt in a world of absolutes.

Fascists don’t want you to think for yourself, which makes it p convenient that you have ai to “think” for you. Fascists don’t want you to create for yourself, so they’ve found a tool that will create for you. Fascists especially don’t want you to have any hope, so they’ve engineered a machine to kill it.

The fact that this machine rapidly consumes the life-giving resources of the planet in the process ain’t a bug, y’all—it’s a feature. Divest yourself from dependency on the killing machine, before it’s too late.

Listen to the artists, the visionaries, the dreamers. Hang out in our pockets of hope, that those pockets might overflow and spill out into our communities. The picture fascists want to paint of the future is one full of hate and violence and terror, and they’ve commissioned genAI to produce it. The tech broligarchs, most of whom were raised on post-apocalyptic sci-fi, believe this hellscape is inevitable. They believe they are powerless to prevent it. Thank fuck they are a countable few. It’s not too late for you—not yet.

And you might think “but I’m just one person, what difference does my piddling usage really make” bc you think the point of not using something is to destroy the company that makes the thing and if you can’t do that, well what’s the point. And I’ll tell you, it’s taking a fucking stand that’s the point. You can’t promote the supposed benefits of something that’s doing such monstrous harm—the ledger’s still tilted, the bad far far outweighs the good. You can’t fuck around w this shit without destroying lives in the process, so by using it you’re indicating that you think your laziness is more important than someone else’s fucking existence.

As someone who is fluent in hyperbole, this ain’t it.

[jayarrarr]

This man, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, was killed by 🧊 a couple days ago, less than a mile from my house. The sign pictured at his memorial says it all for me: I didn’t know you, but I love you. This neighborhood has been my home for the past three years, and it’s also my favorite place I’ve ever lived. This community has welcomed and embraced me more than I ever thought possible in today’s United States. We are neighbors and we are family. We show up for each other and we showed up last night for Lorenzo and his family.

You ever been to a protest and a block party breaks out? Just how we roll. Nothing but love.

For those abt to cast judgment or ask what he was doing (for the record, driving to fucking work): fuck you. Fuck you for wanting to live in a place where unidentified men can swoop out of an unmarked car and gun you tf down if you don’t do what they say. Fuck you for imagining there’s any sort of nuance in that. And especially fuck you for questioning this man’s immigration status and believing it’s ok for him to fucking die abt that.

The voices rising up from the East End of Houston over the steady drone of summer cicadas punctuated by ever-passing trains were clear: FROM PALESTINE TO MEXICO ALL THE WALLS HAVE GOT TO GO

[jayarrarr]

They killed another man today in Maine, in front of his fucking 3-year-old daughter. YA BASTA

To be entirely explicit:

NO ONE deserves to die for failing to comply w anything a law enforcement officer says. Ever. If you’ve said any variation of “they just should’ve complied,” you are expressing your desire to live in a fascist police state. Own it.

NO ONE deserves to die bc their fucking immigration paperwork isn’t in order. Ever. If you’ve ever said any variation of “they should just come here legally,” you must also agree that if someone’s vehicle registration or driver’s license is expired, they should just be shot. That, too, is a fascist police state.

NO ONE deserves to be chased, hunted down, imprisoned, or killed for the non-crime of existing in this or any place. If you imagine there’s any nuance here, if you’ve ever said any variation of “I’ll withhold judgment until I’ve seen all the evidence,” you’re misunderstanding the point of evidence, which is to prove that a specific crime was committed, not that an event we already know happened was also in fact a crime. Self-defense is an affirmative defense, which means the person asserting it bears the burden of proof. If these men “weaponized their vehicles” (spoiler alert: they didn’t), it is up to 🧊, up to the feds, to demonstrate that by proferring evidence that backs up their defense—until then, you aren’t jumping to conclusions to call these killings unjustified murders. That’s exactly what they are.

Your tolerance for them speaks volumes.

[jayarrarr]

This man, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, was killed by 🧊 a couple days ago, less than a mile from my house. The sign pictured at his memorial says it all for me: I didn’t know you, but I love you. This neighborhood has been my home for the past three years, and it’s also my favorite place I’ve ever lived. This community has welcomed and embraced me more than I ever thought possible in today’s United States. We are neighbors and we are family. We show up for each other and we showed up last night for Lorenzo and his family.

You ever been to a protest and a block party breaks out? Just how we roll. Nothing but love.

For those abt to cast judgment or ask what he was doing (for the record, driving to fucking work): fuck you. Fuck you for wanting to live in a place where unidentified men can swoop out of an unmarked car and gun you tf down if you don’t do what they say. Fuck you for imagining there’s any sort of nuance in that. And especially fuck you for questioning this man’s immigration status and believing it’s ok for him to fucking die abt that.

The voices rising up from the East End of Houston over the steady drone of summer cicadas punctuated by ever-passing trains were clear: FROM PALESTINE TO MEXICO ALL THE WALLS HAVE GOT TO GO

[jayarrarr]

Incidentally, that friend I mentioned earlier, the one who said this was a battle between love and fear? She was saying this in the context of an almost mea culpa kind of statement. She’s always been more or less leftist leaning, but she had this (mis)conception that folks further to the left were just angry and pissed off all the time, that we were coming from some ego-driven, all-or-nothing, “my way or the highway” kind of place, and she was admitting that she’d been wrong abt that, which is something that takes a lot of strength to do. She said what she realized as she started reading more and listening more and talking to more ppl was that we weren’t motivated by a desire for power but by love, that our rage was fueled not by hate but by love.

Once anyone realizes this, all their arguments against us reveal themselves to be castles in the sand whose only destiny is to crumble.

[jayarrarr]

It was a simple question, posted on a social media account w a large, mostly liberal, following: if you could eliminate one thing from the world w a snap of your fingers, what would it be?

Most of the responses said “humans.”

Not fascism. Not racism. Not poverty. Not hunger. Not nuclear weapons. Not bombs. Not pollution. Not data centers. Not billionaires. Not greed.

Humanity. This is the answer the tech broligarchs want ppl to say, by the way. They believe humanity needs to go away too. And it’s indicative of a particular mindset that holds the solution to problems is to punish those responsible for it. All of those worthy candidates for extinction are human problems, caused by humans. Punish the humans.

The problem w this mindset, and we’ve known this for centuries, is that punishment doesn’t work. It doesn’t deter anyone from doing a thing, nor does it fix the problems caused by the doing of the thing. It’s as effective as going on a shopping spree to boost your mood.

If your solution to all the problems in the world is that humanity needs to go, you’re a fascist—an eco-fascist, to be precise. Your remedies are of the scorched-earth genre and you would readily throw the baby out w the bath water to save the bathroom.

I don’t think most of the ppl who gave their knee-jerk response were thinking that deeply and they’d probably be offended that I called them fascists, but that’s only bc they haven’t thought through their actual beliefs enough to recognize the pattern. For most of them, I’m sure, it was a reaction borne out of desperation and profound helplessness. Desperate times call for desperate measures, after all.

Humans have caused a lot of problems in this world, for themselves and for all other living things. But throwing humanity on the sacrificial pyre isn’t the answer. The answer is 42.

The answer is to see and feel the love within you and recognize that all ppl have that same love within them. Pull it out of the dark recesses and plop it front and center among your motivations for moving. Breathe into it, expand it, and react from it. A friend of mine said the other day that what we’re really seeing is a battle between love and fear, and I think she’s right. It’s fear that tells you to destroy before you’re destroyed, hate before you’re hurt. It’s love that helps you see a better world is not only possible, but potential.

[jayarrarr]

I found this image on, of all places, fucking LinkedIn. It was posted in a freelance group I had joined whenever ago. And listen—a job in a capitalist economy is wage slavery. But this is LinkedIn so let’s cut em some slack.

The real message is that writing is real work, done by real humans. It might just be some of the most important work on the planet, bc writing is how we humans communicate w each other across time and distance, we’ve been doing it since forever, since even before the dawn of “time” as a concept. Y’all remember cave paintings.

And so. There’s a reason it’s one of the first “jobs” the tech lords decided to do away with and let ai take over. They might not even be consciously aware of this reason, but they act on it intuitively.

Writing is how we humans communicate w each other across time and distance. When you cede the power to communicate, you’ve isolated yourself and made yourself dependent on whatever you’ve ceded that power to—here, a predict-and-complete algorithm. The problem is that ppl don’t communicate in predictable ways most of the time. If they did, you’d never be surprised or shocked, you’d never be awed by a turn of phrase. They don’t want you to be unpredictable. They want everything to be the same.

Saying that dependency on ai drains folks of basic skills kinda misses the point. I didn’t write all my supervising attorney’s emails for her bc she didn’t know how to do it herself—I did it bc she didn’t like doing it and was in a position where she could just make someone else do the shit she didn’t like to do. There’s a lot of executive-level type folks who can’t be assed to do that kind of shit themselves, just like there’s lots of billionaires who’ve forgotten how to pump gas or think “groceries” is some quaint, old-fashioned word, but nobody bemoans their loss of basic skills.

And every small business that claims they “had to” use genAI bc they “couldn’t afford” a real artist will also claim that raising the minimum wage would destroy their business.

Those folks have never wanted to pay writers fairly for the value they add—genAI just gives them a more efficient way to do that. For all that it’s being forced on consumers without their consent, it’s being sold to business owners (small and large) as a way to maximize their profits without having to deal w messy unpredictable humans. A lot of them who originally fucked around w it are rapidly finding out that it’s a lot more expensive and inefficient than they were led to believe it would be. Ah well, there’s a sucker born every minute.

Humans will always need healthcare workers bc humans have organic bodies. And humans will always need creative artists (writers, painters, designers, musicians, etc.) bc humans have hearts and minds. Any system that doesn’t prioritize those needs is doomed to failure, and indeed, history is littered w their remains. Capitalism will one day be roadside detritus as well, the only question is how many of us it’ll take out in the inevitable crash.

[jayarrarr]

This photo will be in history books, if those are things we still have 50 years from now. I think it tells you all you need to know abt an ideology that its adherents are willing to don dark-colored clothing and cover their whole ass heads so they can march outside in the blazing sun in 100-degree temperatures. It tells you they’re inherently submissive to authority, willing to damage or even destroy their own bodies if that “authority” tells them to. It tells you that the “authority” to which they bow doesn’t give a fuck abt their health or safety. It tells you these guys aren’t interested in making anyone’s life “better”—on the contrary, they want everyone to suffer, just as they do.

At its inception, the purpose of klan hoods was intimidation. They weren’t hiding their identities bc they feared repercussions—they wanted to force their target audience (Black ppl) to assume that all white ppl might be klan members bc they were unable to isolate those who were. That’s not a motivation that makes any sense today, when everybody and their mother has a camera attached to them, when we can all freely see a countable number of these assholes engaging in assholery while the vast majority of folks are at worst minding their own business. Now, they do it bc they’re scared. They’re afraid that if their identity is known, their lives and livelihoods will be at risk. And they’re terrified bc deep down they know that they deserve to lose their life and livelihood for this bullshit. The true believers recognize their views are unpopular and see that as a sign of the decline of humanity or some shit, which is v American of them. When your Founding Fathers talked abt the “tyranny of the majority,” they were talking abt the same thing. They knew they were oppressing ppl. They knew slavery was wrong. They were just trying to get away w it as long as possible, and y’all still are.

I’m not trying to evoke anything by quoting FDR, he had his war crimes too, but he did say, “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” and he was right abt that. Fear makes ppl reactionary, and it’s reactionariness that folks really mean when they talk abt someone being “too emotional” like that’s a bad thing. Fear triggers and hate shoots. What an exhausting game to play.

[jayarrarr]

As you celebrate Independence Day this weekend, whatever that means to you, I’d like to also invite you to think abt coercive power. Of all the different types of power, coercive power is probably the shittiest one, but it’s one that we hold up in society and give to all sorts of ppl who don’t deserve it. In fact, I’m going to argue that no one deserves it.

Coercive power is the power to force others to do something (or stop doing something) against their will or better judgment. Some ppl have this coercive power over anyone while others are more limited. For example, a cop has coercive power that’s limited by jurisdiction, as does a judge. A teacher has coercive power over their students, maybe even other students in their school. Your boss at work has coercive power over you. Parents have coercive power over their children. None of these ppl need to either have or exercise coercive power at all.

First of all, and only bc this should be relatively uncontroversial to dispense with, but there’s nothing inborn or inherent in anyone that entitles them to exercise coercive power over others. Right? We can all agree on that. So w that in mind, what do you imagine would entitle someone to exercise coercive power over others? What traits, what skills, what knowledge, mean that this person who has them can just force other ppl to do things, backed up by the ability to take their life or livelihood if they refuse?

Yeah, I couldn’t come up w anything either, and neither could society, bc we tend to require ppl in our society who wield coercive power to have education and training in how to wield that power responsibly and ethically, a strategy that’s effective at least occasionally. The truth is there’s no responsible or ethical exercise of coercive power and it isn’t necessary at all. Coercive power is the weapon of the invader, the colonizer, the imperialist.

In case you’re wondering who’s gonna “keep order,” the answer is who cares. Order isn’t something that needs to be kept. If this “order” you speak of actually benefits folks, they’ll maintain it themselves regardless bc they all recognize it’s a good thing. When someone is out of order, everyone will p quickly be like hey man we don’t do that here. One night after a World Cup match at my neighborhood watering hole, some rival fans were getting a bit touchy w each other and tumbled out onto the patio. Immediately there were a bunch of ppl urging them to break it up or at least leave the bar’s property, hey hey this is not the place, hey man c’mon don’t do this here, c’mon let’s not. The thing was a non-issue before the door guy, who has a badge and a uniform and everything and is supposedly the one to force ppl to behave, was even able to cross the room to see what all the fuss was abt. He wasn’t necessary—we like our watering hole without fisticuffs, we all understand this, so folks stepped up and de-escalated the situation quickly and cleanly. When “order” isn’t really serving anyone, on the other hand, we’re happy to let it slide. You ever wonder how animals manage to live in relative harmony w each other without any cops?

The Founding Fathers of this Great Nation made up this shit abt the “tyranny of the majority” bc they wanted to convince ppl that not only was it a Good Idea to have hall monitors, but that they should be those hall monitors. The reason they needed hall monitors is bc they had just had a Revolution, and during that Revolution they talked abt freedom a whole bunch, but they only ever really meant freedom for a specific class of ppl, namely them, and they were a distinct minority—not just white men (and “white” was drawn much more narrowly), but white men who owned land.

Most of them owned slaves as well. And if you’re one white man who owns a plantation w 100 slaves, that’s a serious risk—especially if you’re a gentleman whose hypocrisy holds no bounds, a gentleman who wouldn’t hesitate to raise the whip before the word “freedom” had cooled from his lips. The tyranny they feared was the one where the ppl they have been oppressing rise up against them. Coercive power was the instrument they used to ensure that didn’t happen, and the “tyranny of the majority” was their dog whistle. Your beloved Constitution was created in large part to protect white supremacy before it came crashing down on their tri-cornered heads. The government the Constitution created was v intricately and delicately crafted to ensure that the white planter class could protect and maintain its control over the new country, control that was always illegitimate.

Coercive power is only necessary for illegitimate purposes. If something is beneficial and valuable and worth doing, ppl will do it regardless. If something is worth protecting, ppl will protect it. There are scores of examples of this literally everywhere on the planet. You even do it yourself—for example, every time you slow down while driving your car, not bc a cop might catch you speeding, but bc you can see that there are kids out playing and you don’t want to hurt one of them w your thousand-pound death machine.

If a societal norm, or custom, or rule, is worth keeping and maintaining, ppl will do that. They’ll take care to remind others, might even put a sign up. And when ppl violate that norm, ppl will remind them of it in a way befitting the violation and the context of the situation. When coercive power is the only tool in your toolbox, the result is overkill, is unnecessary pain and anger and resentment.

Coercive power isn’t just cops, ether, and it isn’t just “authority figures.” Any time someone decides they’re better than someone else, they might feel free to attempt to exercise coercive power. They’re just repeating the patterns they’ve seen modeled for them a million times before. When they’re not seeing those models over and over on the daily, they’ll stop feeling the impetus to repeat them. Our pasts are littered w the detritus of discarded habits and behavior patterns that we left behind when they ceased to serve us. True independence can’t exist while we still acknowledge the right of any individual to exercise coercive power over another.

[jayarrarr]

Oh yeah, so I forgot to tell y’all but I was introduced the other day to the term “hobbyless behavior” which is the English translation for an allegedly popular German phrase. To be absolutely transparent: I don’t know if it’s actually a popular phrase or even if it’s German or even if anyone is saying it at all, I’m saying it bc it’s awesome.

The reason it’s awesome is that it points to a v real problem, which is that all these chuds who spend all their time hating other ppl just for existing have nothing in their lives to devote their spiritual energy to, nothing they’re passionate abt, nothing that brings them joy, nothing that they do just for the sake of doing. In short, they have no hobbies, and not having any hobbies is actually bad for you—it can make your life feel dull and flat, just the same monotonous drudgery over and over, which makes you depressed and anxious. Bc hobbies often involve interacting w other ppl, you become isolated and alienated. Male loneliness epidemic? That’s hobbyless behavior. Jake Lang waving around a sign that says “black parents are failures” at the BET awards of all fucking places, while wearing an ankle monitor after having been banned from the entire state of Texas? Peerless hobbyless behavior.

It’s awesome bc it’s not actually insulting anyone. I’m not making fun of anyone for anything that’s outside of their control. A heart full of love has no room for hate and a human full of passion and joy isn’t interested in denigrating or insulting anyone else, bc that’s hobbyless behavior and ain’t no time for that.

[jayarrarr]

Honestly the great replacement chuds are kind of the best bc it’s just so silly what they’re choosing to take personally and get pissed off abt.

Like the human race is getting darker over time? That’s how evolution works bro. But also the sun is getting hotter and brighter in a lot of parts of the world that used to be darker and colder so like maybe this isn’t the worst thing to happen. But also who the fuck cares? Are you seriously worshipping at the altar of your own paleness?

It’s the culture they’re really worried abt is what they’ll tell you, but then when you ask what culture they show you adverts and magazine spreads from the 1950s, they show you genAI images, they show you nothing that has ever been real. It’s impossible to lose something nobody ever had in the first place.

Like sure, there are plenty of folks who might get a fact wrong from time to time or misunderstand a historical event in a totally understandable way. Then there’s these guys, who are willing to go out and march in the streets w their whole ass faces carrying torches and shit for a fantasy that has never existed anywhere for anyone.

It’s so the best. Just premium hobbyless behavior.

[jayarrarr]

There are an awful lot of ppl who like to sit on the sidelines and talk abt how “there’s bad on both sides.” No shit, Sherlock—humans aren’t all “good” or all “bad,” that’s not how living works. We operate from a limited perspective, we make mistakes, we react from trauma in ways we may or may not come to regret.

A former friend used to light up my posts going on and on in condescending tones abt how whatever issue I posted abt wasn’t as simple as I made it out to be, there were complexities and nuances that he reckoned I wasn’t taking into consideration. As tho reasonable minds might differ on whether it was morally or ethically justified to kill literal babies. These folks who like to talk abt how complex some shit is are just lining themselves up an excuse to not act.

I feel the same way abt ppl who just “don’t like to get into politics” as tho it’s something you can opt out of. If you maintain a disinterest in politics it’s only bc your government hasn’t done anything to fuck w you and your life directly yet. And y’know what? I hope it never does bc I don’t wish trauma on anyone. But in the meantime, never mistake your apathy for anything other than privilege, in this case, the privilege not to be hunted down by the state bc you happen to have been born in the “wrong” body, the “wrong” skin. You are not seen as a body—you are seen as a human being.

You have a choice to participate; you can decline according to your convenience. When you choose to do that rather than stand and fight w all those ppl who don’t get a choice, you’re following in a long line of slavers, conquerors, and genociders. I’m sure they’d be proud.

[jayarrarr]

This specific anti-genAI movement might just be my favorite. Like, I’ve seen a huge uptick in zine production—it’s like every mfer has a zine now, which makes me feel warm and nostalgic abt the 90s when that was also the case.

But I’ve also seen a lot of instances of folks who would’ve used photographs and basic graphic design just rejecting the entire polished computer-graphics aesthetic and going back to hand-drawn art. Today I saw a co-op advert where they had hired an artist to draw the products on sale that week, from produce to Coca-Cola, and I was like holy fuck, this I can actually get behind. Like the extremism of genAI has triggered folks to wonder if they ever even needed computer tools to draw a watermelon in the first place.

And we totally don’t! But we’ve become so obsessed w neatness and perfection, particularly in commercial art, that there’s no room for the actual messiness of humanity and the real world to play, even in the margins.

And some of this might be less a movement than an over-correction to stave off unfounded accusations of genAI usage. That’s partially why I don’t worry abt using shortened words in my writing, as well as why I don’t proofread as heavily as I once did (genAI misspells words and writes gobbledygook in infographics and charts bc it interprets and generates them as images, not as readable text—a sign on an AI-generated building displays text-shaped characters).

Things produced by humans are imperfect bc humans are imperfect. This is fine bc no one seriously expects humans to do things perfectly. It also helps to understand that algorithms were created by humans as well, so they’ll never be perfect either. Oh, but folks expect them to be.

If you don’t understand this contradiction: perfection is an ideal that doesn’t exist outside any individual’s mind, and each individual, bc of all the experiences and exposures that have gone into building their perspective, has a different idea of what constitutes perfection. All of which is to say perfection itself has no basis in reality and should therefore be considered of equal (read: none) value. What really enhances our lives is the opportunity to see through someone else’s eyes, and that’s something genAI can never do.