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qrgirl-deactivated20220303

a lack of intersectionality in your personal politics will literally melt your brain. conceptualizing all systems of oppression as just disparate entities that arised entirely independently from one another is the most ahistorical take you could possibly have on any social phenomenon ever. look at how systems built on white supremacy have historically viewed homosexuality, transgenderism, disability, religious diversity, women, class, etc. and how the "logic" that upholds each of those reenforces the others, none of these can be tackled independently, thats just not something thats possible to do, to dismantle one you must dismantle all, to pretend otherwise is to perpetuate.

chrisdornerfanclub

The United States government doesn’t have to take the position of sending people to work and school to their deaths and absolutely ensuring an explosion of breakthrough infections while saying “well it’s your fault if the conditions for mass infection we’ve laid out through our laissez-faire public health policies designed to extract the maximum amount of profit during a crisis kills you”.

This is the issue with taking a totally individualist perspective on the pandemic that blames conspiratorial individuals for not taking the right health measures. It completely ignores the whole role of the state which has deliberately prevented any kind of strict measures that would’ve saved lives because it would disrupt business too much and would empower workers and poor through aid. By placing all the focus and blame on anti-vaxxers we miss that we wouldn’t be in this position if the United States government cared more about global public health than its ability to profit while people en mass die. The anti-vaxxers play a role but it would’ve been a far more minor one if we didn’t have exclusionary patent laws that are allowing the virus to mutate in the regions of the world with the least access to vaccines (despite wanting them!) and if the state was unafraid of angering business by putting into place robust stay at home policies where we pay and deliver food to people to keep them at home.

The United States government is going out of its way to choose the most cruel policy positions during this crisis and have successfully gotten many people to shift blame from the most powerful agent in the situation to a bunch of idiots who are coughing to death because they think microchips can fit into a needle. Congratulations on swallowing that propaganda whole heartedly.

chrisdornerfanclub

dysennoea

[Image Description: Tweet by @MadinaAgenor reading, “It bears repeating (still), even after epidemiologists have been saying this for years (!!), but individual-level strategies will not solve population-level health problems. Only equitable population-level strategies (policies, structural change, resource allocation) can do that.”]

chrisdornerfanclub

tami-taylors-hair

“Mean girls all grow up to be nurses!”

“Mean girls all go into social work!”

“The mean girl to teacher pipeline!”

Y’all, these are just pink collar jobs. The reason you think there’s so many “mean girls” in these fields is because they’re all like 97% women. Of course some of them are gonna be assholes. There’s assholes everywhere.

We get it. Your job isn’t like other girls’ jobs. It’s a cool job.

onepunchman

it’s true that there are some incredibly cruel people in all of these professions.

it’s also true that they all suffer from chronic underpayment, overwork, lack of institutional support, and insane bureaucratic demands that would make them fail the people in their care all the time even if every single one was a saint.

rotationalsymmetry

That’s absolutely missing the point.

While those are all “helper” professions and they very much are pink collar (and are underpaid, that’s not an incompatible idea), they’re also ones that involve power over vulnerable people’s lives. (And I’ve only encountered it as a comparison to, say, male bullies becoming cops, it’s not like men aren’t being mentioned here.)

Secretaries/administrative assistants aren’t on that list for a reason. Flight attendants aren’t on that list. Housecleaners aren’t on that list. Receptionists. Customer service representatives. Dental hygienists. The people who style hair or do nails. That’s not a list of pink collar jobs. It’s specifically (pink collar) positions where if you want to abuse people you’re relatively likely to get away with it.

It can both be true that “nurses who care for disabled people need better pay” and “nurses who care for disabled people have a lot of opportunities to abuse their power and that’s something worth talking about.”

Women aren’t immune from treating people badly because they’re women, or because women are underpaid. They’re sure not immune from specifically seeking out jobs that will allow them to be cruel without any consequences to them, if they get personal satisfaction out of being cruel.

You are trying to shut down a conversation about abuse.

stickynotes10

are you seriously trying to argue ‘mean girls all grow up to be nurses’ is a conversation about abuse? like anyone would actually spend hundreds of dollars for a nursing degree just to… abuse disabled people?

the reason nurses, teachers and social workers often come off as rude is because their jobs are all stressful as hell. the shitwank pay grade, the constant disrespect (please god stop pretending like nursing isn’t a very strict and difficult 3+ YEAR MEDICAL DEGREE), dealing with asshole kids all day, i’m just saying if 80% of my day was spent caring for people who would later turn around and call me a ‘mean girl’ i’d be a bit of a bitch too.

celestialinent

There are plenty of perfectly compassionate and kind nurses, but @rotationalsymmetry isn’t saying there isn’t, they aren’t saying that all nurses are secretly evil women looking for ways to abuse disabled people. they’re saying that the job gives them INHERENT power over people, and if they are not good people they could be in a position to really hurt someone.

I also don’t really know how often you engage with nurses on the internet, but just fyi, a worrying amount of them share private, humiliating medical details as content. Or they talk about lying to/drugging/intentionally hurting their patients for minor slights (or hell even extreme slights, but guess what, even if a patients is rude to you there is never a valid reason to hurt or mislead them).

OF COURSE that’s not every nurse. My mother is a nurse and she went into that job to help people. I’ve been under the care of plenty of nurses that did there very best to take good care of me and were super patient and kind to me. But also, jobs like nursing or teaching or social work are a lot like being a cop or a doctor or a prison guard. They offer people power over others, and if someone is predisposed to both a. want and seek out that power and b. abuse that power when they get it, guess what, you’re gonna get nurses who are really only nurses because it makes them feel important and powerful, who wouldn’t hesitate to hurt a patient for being “disrespectful”

Also to your point about how nonsensical it would be for a person to spend money and time getting a degree just to be abusive… You do know that there are doctors who spend even more money and time to be abusive, right? There are cops and police guards who enter life-threatening situations to have power people and abuse that power, right? There are both male and female teachers who go through college and student teaching just so they can abuse children. Abusive people LIKE having power over others and will seek that out.

There is a very big difference between what the previous poster was talking about and ur issue with people just assuming any rude person in nursing teaching or social worker is an abuser. Yes people can be particularly harsh towards rude nurses and teachers and social workers, yes those jobs are stressful.

But being rude and being abusive of your power over others are like, completely different things.

The conversation around nurses RIGHT NOW on the internet IS about patient abuse because a (hopefully) minority of shitty nurses can’t help but tell on themselves for being shitty to patients on the internet. that’s why the meme even came about.

cetus-above

Also: these are high burnout fields, and the people within them become increasingly abusive as they get burned out. Many social workers start out with the goal to save the world and all, but when you work in a big city the people last like 3 years before they’re often just flat out mean and scary to deal with. So you might not have gotten into the field for the inherent power dynamics (when you can take kids away from their parents, there’s a power dynamic) but when you burnout you become mor likely to become a horror story.

cheeseanonioncrisps

Teaching is also often pushed as kind of like a 'default' career, in my experience.

The whole "those who can't do, teach" thing. There's an assumption out there that anyone can become a teacher and that all you need is a basic familiarity with the subject, and that therefore it's the sort of job you can just fall into because your actual plans failed.

This is utterly ridiculous if you think about it for about five seconds.

Teaching in schools doesn't just require knowledge of the subject, but also the skills necessary to communicate that knowledge in such a way that kids can learn it.

And the ability to plan lessons and produce resources.

And the ability to keep control of a room full of people, many of whose brains haven't developed enough to have mastered such things as impulse control and management of emotions.

And frequently the ability to handle personal dramas between students, within and outside the classroom.

While there probably is a minority who genuinely go through the whole process of becoming a teacher solely out of a desire to abuse children, I suspect that most abusive teachers are actually just people who went into the job because they were told it was had long holidays and "anyone could do it" and didn't consider at any point whether they actually had the temperament for it.

Then when they realise that actually they hate their job, and don't have the necessary levels of patience and compassion to deal with a bunch of whining children all day, they take out their frustration on the kids.

roach-works

also like, a lot of people don't seem to understand that abusive people don't generally sit around in their evil lair plotting to hurt people like the grinch. like, the exasperating thing about mean girls is they don't generally think that their behavior is unusually cruel and vindictive, and even if they do, they think it makes them cool and powerful and heroic. it's hot bitch shit. they're tough and powerful. they don't take anyone's crap. they don't cry, they make other people cry. they get even. they get what they want. they get what they deserve.

they don't sit there and think 'i am a mean person and i want to maximize my life so i get to be as mean as possible to as many people as possible and i want to exploit everyone's vulnerabilities whenever i can! hm, maybe i'll be a nurse so i can push disabled children around!'

they think they're good people. they do, on some level, even a lot of levels, want to do the right thing. no one is all bad. no one is comfortable thinking of themselves as all bad. they justify it. abusers think they're justified when they hurt people. they think there are good reasons to hurt people. they think the people they hurt deserve it. that's how it starts.

like, that's what a lot of people really don't want to hear when they talk about stopping abuse and bullying. you want bullies and mean girls to be some separate, alien category of person, to be sitting in a cave somewhere hideously plotting evil. you don't want to acknowledge that all it takes is feeling like it's okay to hurt people if they hurt you first. abuse starts when you think it's fair to hurt people back. and then bit by bit it becomes okay to hurt people back for insulting you. or just not cooperating with you. or not pleasing you enough. or not pleasing you soon enough.

and the kind of people who operate like that will shoot someone dead in the street, or beat their boyfriends, or torture their patients, and they'll tell on themselves on the internet, because every step of the way they have felt like they're just as good a person as you do. probably a better person than you, because you've got doubts, and they don't.

after all, they're a nurse. of course they're a good person.

sangefiruze

"we were born alone & we die alone" you delivered yourself during birth? built all the roofs that have ever given you shelter? sown the wheat in your bread?? weaved the clothes on your back??? wrote all the books youve ever read and the music youve ever listened to????? who made the literal bed youre going to die in - you, all alone?

headspace-hotel

most damaging idea of the 21st century: the conviction of vast numbers of people that human history will end within our lifetimes

climate change represents world-altering tragedy if unchecked, but not even in the worst-case scenario does it mean “literally everyone dies”

yet so many people have jumped already to “it’s over, the world is going to end, we can do nothing about it” and are just paralyzingly cynical. How do I explain that the power to imagine a future is essential for creating it

headspace-hotel

you know the thing where trauma can cause you to just. not expect to live much longer so when you get to 30 you don’t know what to do because you thought you’d be dead by 25

That is happening to all of us right now on a society-wide scale

headspace-hotel

A lot of people are like. REALLY angry at me for suggesting that “be depressed and do nothing” isn’t necessarily the only response to climate change.

this, this, this, this, this, this, and like, 700 other sources will tell you that most of the effects of climate change will be reversible even if we pass the ‘threshold’ of a 1.5 degrees Celsius increase in global temperature

BUT. Even if the worst happens, it will be important to be doing things other than wallowing in misery???

I’m not trying to be callous but for people living today it’s wildly unlikely for the results to be “literally immediate death.”

People will get displaced from their homes by rising sea levels. We have like, years, probably decades, before that happens. It seems so fucked up to decide that we should do nothing, because we’ve already decided they’re going to die anyway????

If a bunch of us are going to die, why not die trying to help each other? Why not try to make sure fewer people die? Why not do something that might reduce someone’s suffering or give them food or clean water or a place to sleep?

I don’t know how to explain to you that people need socks during the apocalypse

elodieunderglass

I keep recommending “The Great Derangement” by Amitav Ghosh because it is a very unflinching look at how culpable we are - not for having families, or forgetting to use the right spoons - but for consistently choosing the luxurious delusions of apocalypses. People can lovingly envision a thousand apocalypses, lavishly decorated by the pop culture we’ve gobbled down; but the reverse is not true, and we lack the imagination that is quite literally needed for the future. To the point where planning for the future is actively undermined by people at all levels, stating that it’s unrealistic. We are at a turning point of human history where people are watching each other knock holes in a shared lifeboat, because “everyone knows that lifeboats are predestined to sink.”

It’s considered unrealistic to imagine the prosperous and equitable future of the next generation, because it doesn’t match pop culture. We have actively given up our responsibilities of stewardship - literally the purpose of human existence - because Hollywood made it look hard. We are forgoing our natural bonds and our collective power because we agreed that our neighbours will probably turn on us, and when we look at the self-fulfilling prophecies and natural consequences of our behavior (pandemic, natural disasters) we claim it’s evidence that we can’t improve, instead of addressing the poor behavior.

Ghosh argues that one of the most radical and revolutionary things that we can do (and in the West, the foremost ETHICAL thing to do) is to task ourselves with reprogramming our imaginations to something functional. In this scenario, everyone can participate in the work; writers can literally take readers by the hand and heal them, people can lead and teach each other on social media, unions can include it in discussions, parents can teach their children, children can teach their parents, and everyone can correct each other. Oh, and people who like boycotts and clout can start a movement demanding more imagination in media. I agree with this, and it has underpinned my work and activism ever since.

maybuds

honestly it’s almost like our generation is set up to be lonelier & more anxious & more insane like imagine already being 20/30-something, the period of your life where you’re expected to be “at your prime”, in the middle of a climate crisis and a pandemic, under late-stage capitalism’s celebrity culture that conditions you to be as likeable & “marketable” as possible, where it seems like every lived experience should be watchable/profitable. & you look at the future you’re supposed to be working hard for & all you see is climate catastrophe meanwhile you scroll down a little & see a skin care ad that’s like “fight aging”. i haven’t said anything here that hasn’t already been said by someone else, but imagine being 20/30-something & normal

luulapants

Story time:

In middle school biology, we did an experiment. We were given yams, which we would sprout in cups of water. We then had to make hypotheses about how the yams would grow, based on descriptions of yam plants in our books, and make notes of our observations as they grew.

Here’s what was supposed to happen: we were supposed to see that the actual growth of the plant did not resemble our hypotheses. We were then supposed to figure out that these were, in fact, sweet potatoes.

What actually happened was that every single student in every single class lied in their notes so that their observations perfectly matched their hypotheses. See, everyone assumed the mismatch meant they had done something wrong in the process of growing the plant or that they had misunderstood the dichotomous key or the plant identification terminology. And, thanks to the wonders of a public school education, everyone assumed the wrong results would get us a failing grade. We were trying to pass. We didn’t want to get bitched out by the teacher. Curiosity, learning, science - that had nothing to do with why we were sitting in that classroom. So we all lied.

The teacher was furious. She tried to fail every student, but the administration stepped in and told her she wasn’t allowed to because a 100% fail rate is recognized as a failure of the teacher, not the class. It wasn’t even her fault, really, though her being a notorious hard-ass didn’t help. It was a failure of the entire educational system.

So whenever I see crap like Elizabeth Holmes’s blood test scam or pharmaceutical trials which are unable to be replicated or industry-funded research that reaches wildly unscientific conclusions, I just remember those fucking sweet potatoes. I remember that curiosity dies when people are just trying to give their superiors the “right” answers, so they can get the grade, get the job, get the paycheck. It’s not about truth when it’s about paying rent. There’s no scientific integrity if you can’t control for human desperation.

msaprildaniels

There’s no scientific integrity if you can’t control for human desperation.

cryptonature

Too many of our narratives frame most positive, world-changing action as a fight.

When I think of what has brought the most impactful growth to my world, to my community, to the strange wilderness inside my skull,

it wasn't fighting.

It was patience, kindness, and stubborn love.

xoxo-ben-xoxo

"I don't want to read leftist theory it's all written by old white men" FANON IS RIGHT THERE

I understand not wanting to read theory because it's exclusive, elitist, or just plain hard to understand, but I'm begging you to please give Fanon's work a read if you can. Especially if your argument for not reading theory is the quote above.

lesbiansandgayssupporttheminers

Honestly there is so much theory that is not written by old white men.

I'd also recommend Davis for leftists theory written in an accessible way by a woman of colour.

right-2-rebel-deactivated202210

Additional theorists:

CLR James

José Carlos Mariátegui

George Padmore

Huey Newton

Che Guevara

Angela Davis

Ho Chi Minh

Alexandra Kollontai

Rosa Luxemburg

Mao Tse-tung

Walter Rodney

Just some of the ones accessible on marxists.org for free. This small list doesn't even include momentous figures like Castro, Lumumba, and Sankara or other writers like Federici, Shakur, Butler, or Lorde.

dessalines-raised-sword

Amilcar Cabral

Julius Nyerere

Safiya Bukhari

Bell Hooks

AbdulRahman Mohammed Babu

Sanyika Shakur

Dhoruba Bin Wahad

Mumia Abu Jamal

Paulo Friere

Amié Césaire

Robin D.G. Kelley

I will add more to the list and links later.

fuckyeahanarchistposters

“Prisons do not disappear social problems, they disappear human beings”

- Angela Davis

capricorn-0mnikorn

The Just-World Hypothesis mindset holds that we can control whether or not good and bad things happen, through our actions (also called the Just-World Fallacy)

That if you do everything “Right” (Whatever your culture or subculture says is “Right”):

Eat “Clean” foods,

Exercise the right way, in the right amounts,

Hold the “correct” political and/or religious views,

Say the “Right” words,

Spend your money on all the “Right” things,

Take in all the “Right” and “Moral” stories,

Etc.

Then you will never fall sick, or have an accident, or be poor, and you will be happy and successful. And if something bad does happen to you, it must be because you slipped up somewhere, and it must somehow be your fault.

(And if something bad happens to someone else, it most definitely is their fault, and they were probably doing everything wrong, and therefore deserved it)

(And if someone is remarkably wealthy, and healthy, and has everything they want, then it must be because they are living a morally good life, and their opinions on all things should be respected and emulated)

This leads to victim blaming on the one hand, and idol worship of people like Elon Musk on the other.

And if you’re a kid with a disability born to a family that believes the Just World Hypothesis, then your life is more likely to be swallowed up by therapies, and surgeries, and attempts to cure you (or you get punished, when your disability shows itself, because that’s a sign that you’re a moral failure somehow, and must be corrected).

But:

Even though we can not control when bad things happen, we do have the power to make those bad things far less tragic.

And it starts with compassion, inclusion, and social welfare.

r-ob-yn

There is obviously ableism rife in the anticiv movement, and this is because any ideology that doesn't actively center disability justice will in fact be ableist. This isn't a write-off of anticiv by any means, on the contrary anticiv needs more exploration for this reason.

As far as I'm aware, only two axis of oppression have managed to fully center themselves within an anticiv rhetoric so far: first, indigenous anticiv scholars have time and time again proven they are the most equiped among us to develop (or refuse to develop, as the case may be) anticiv ideas, and have done so in such a way that decolonisation has become a fundamental and centered part of anticiv.

Second, trans women have centered ourselves in anticiv, and built present and future refuges where, even if we aren't free of transmysogyny, we have access to the kinds of care, defense, community, and liberation that we are presently denied (read baedan).

I firmly believe that a disabled anticiv anarchism is the next step in anticiv imaginings. I hope to contribute to it, though I'm still struggling to find still-operating zines or journals in our niche (perhaps these are too formal for us in 2022). There's so much joy and liberation to be found in the struggle for a world not swaddled in a straight jacket (see what I did there) of international industrial reliances.

In the meantime, though, the fact that this hasn't been developed yet means that, even though most of us are disabled ourselves, there are certain lapses into ableism in our discourses. Notably, we're still relying on the social model of disability almost exclusively (which is a very beautiful and justice oriented model, and negating the medical model is itself one of the beautiful parts of anticiv! But it has a number of shortcomings that contemporary disabled scholars are addressing with other models).

I implore you to join me in exploring our future imaginings in ways that actively and intentionally include those with different support needs than ourselves. People paralyzed in four limbs, people with full body weakness so extreme they can't transition into and out of bed themselves, people who can't swallow and use feeding tubes all deserve the same liberation or defense from civ that we imagine for ourselves, and centering them is a long overdue next step in anticiv scholarship.

r-ob-yn

@cernoid-leporidae @baltowolfquest here are some cursory readings on disability models, fair warning ive only skimmed them:

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-9566.12199

https://www.disabled-world.com/definitions/disability-models.php

https://disabilitystudies.nl/sites/disabilitystudies.nl/files/beeld/onderwijs/gabel_peters_2005_presage_of_a_paradigm_shift_beyond_the_social_model_of_disability_toward_resistance_theories_of_disability.pdf

(im most excited about that last one)

hope yall enjoy!

obedientlyviolentshepherd

Id also love to add Disability Justice as a model of disability especially as it is discussed in Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha's book Care Work:

Click here for a plain-text PDF of the ten principles and their brief descriptions . For an updated version of the 10 Principles with mo

Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice | Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha | download | Z-Library. Download books for free. Find books

evolvingessence

heartonthefloor

Like….when everyone has mental illness maybe the problem is with the systems 🤔

aleshakills

I don’t think you’re ready to have an adult conversation about politics until you’re able to admit that there are things you love and enjoy that would not and should not exist in a just world. $8 billion dollar budget movies every other month don’t exist in a just world. New 900 GB AAA video games every year don’t exist in a just world. Next day delivery doesn’t exist in a just world. 80 different soda brands don’t exist in a just world.

All of those things come from exploitation on some level, and if you wouldn’t trade those for a world where everyone can eat and have a home no matter who they are or what they do, I don’t know what to tell you.

Edit: I made this comment a few days ago, but since it’s been buried in the 40k notes this post got since then, I’ll repeat it here. I agree that delivery of medications and other vital supplies are essential! The “Next day delivery” I’m talking about is shit like Amazon that relies on incredibly awful national supply chains. If I had known this post was going to get this much attention, I would have been more explicit.

unbidden-yidden-deactivated20240

I am begging people, down on my hands and knees, to include the following in your discourse:

Nuance

Humility

Compassion

Context

Evaluating opinions based on their merits rather than on who is saying it

Perspective

Self-awareness & De-escalation

Like I'm not saying I'm perfect at this - far from it! But oh my g-d would this improve so much if everyone actually tried.

derinthescarletpescatarian

But bullying each other based on bad faith readings of highly compressed out-of-context takes provides a better emotional high without any of that complicated thinking!

characterlimit

“Karl Marx is most famous as a critic of capitalism, but at the heart of his critique can be found a desperate plea for the transformation of work. People, he argues, express themselves and create the world through creative and collective activity. This natural tendency is twisted into something unrecognisable in work under capitalism. He didn’t just think work around him was bad because it took place in noisy and dangerous conditions, or for low wages and long hours. The problem of work was a fundamental one: under capitalism, work takes something human and turns it into something monstrous. The forces of capital become ravenous, eating up all that is human, sucking on the very lifeblood of society.”

— Amelia Horgan, Lost in Work: Escaping Capitalism (via probablyasocialecologist)

joofers-the-red-deactivated2022

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