Author: Madeira Darling

Madeira Darling is a snarky mystic, devout Satanist, serious Marxist, laughing dominatrix, and writer from San Fransisco where they live with their boyfriend in a house full of altars to their various demons.

lukexvx:

salchristina:

thepeacockangel:

I feel like a lot of the shitty dynamics that crop up on the left are the result of traumatized people who haven’t dealt with their shit sufficiently to be able to do organization effectively trauma bonding and forming unhealthy group dynamics.

And like there’s genuinely, really truly nothing wrong with being in too fucked up a place to do political work. No one’d be expecting you to do work place organizing while you were in traction after a skiing accident, trauma’s the same way. Heal up *then* organize.

This is a good thing to focus on. Unfortunately I don’t think it’s always possible…

Some ideas about what I feel like would make this more possible:

– there needs to be ways to participate in revolutionary or anti-capitalist culture that are not “doing organizing” then, right? based on people’s social location and needs. for instance something as simple as regularly being with people who don’t reenforce the idea that you bring poverty on yourself, or women needing both material support to get away from abusive men, but also relationships with women who have unlearned patriarchy and won’t look down on them for not performing ‘femininity’. it’s hard to heal or even decide what healing means to you if you only have access to the therapies and recovery models of the dominant culture that are mostly concerned with ‘adjusting’ you to your oppression.

– dynamics vary a bit based on what left or radical spaces we’re dealing with. there’s one pocket that’s like the pretty heavily paid-staff-centric part that’s absorbed in the npic, and gives rise to a lot of articles and media that seem mostly relevant to people who can Make Their Living that way. slightly different dynamic if you’re dealing with student activists or people working in academia. and then I guess there was  another subculture mostly anarchist of people who’d spend a confusing amount of time worrying about whether different small personal lifestyle choices were more or less radical, though (I think??) that scene seems to have branched out into other struggles and gained a bit more perspective on the Different Ways People Have To Live In The Damn World.

I’ve worked mostly with 1 student activists, then 2 people who’d have a day job with some mainstream progressive org and then do radical projects on low/no budget alongside that, pilfering mainstream org resources when they could, and now 3 people w/ mostly unrelated jobs who usually organize unpaid but can get some grants for some specific things sometimes

– anyway it was mostly/only in the context of seeing people with values similar to mine providing other models for how to socialize, that I started to feel I could examine and change my unhealthy or damaging ways of behaving towards others. because god knows the options school/family/professionals gave me on how to change before hat, were just geared towards making me a better victim, and damn straight I’d keep my own dysfunction over that.

maybe a big piece of this is realizing there are more burnt out or dislocated people with fierce antagonisms towards capitalism, deeply held values around liberation, and well-versed and nuanced bodies of knowledge, than there are people with those same things actively and securely engaged in some organization or other. and that’s not personal, and that’s not a failure, and that’s just where a ton of us are and we can find and listen to people in that space.

anyway i just came home from a tri-state healthcare rights gathering and was immersed with people who do some great outreach/propaganda work and make me think I can actually do things about this. in a minute I’ll probably reblog a semi-related post that I’m also reflecting on a lot…

yeh, if there’s an implication that organizing relationships can reify trauma or spread it, there’s also an implication that for some folks, organizing spaces can also be one of the few spaces for even the opportunity to grow out of trauma.

I come from an organizing background that has some students, and mostly unpaid labour people. I’ve generally found staffers have staffer politics and students have a problematic tendency to feel like destroying a project is better than improving it because “moral purity”. I’ve seen a lot of good work implode from people not dealing with their shit.

I’m burnt out as hell because one group of comrades (filled with traumatized people) won’t stop going after a different traumatized person (who’s also not dealing with their shit well) to the point where they’ve been repeatedly suicidal and in the only one left trying to prevent the person from goddamned killing themself. Maybe I’m tired and bitter but I see people try and use projects that should be moving us towards revolution as group therapy (except shitty and not actually helpful) and destroying whatever revolutionary potential they have.

elfboi:

thepeacockangel:

maddieallheart:

thepeacockangel:

#jetset

Click Here Join the Free porn cams free

I have done nothing to deserve this.

It’s just a SEO bot. If you Google “free porn cams”, you are more likely to see results to which some decent porn blog run by an actual human being links – unless a bot can convince Google it is a decent site, which is why they like and reblog stuff from random Tumblrs. The link pointing from a Tumblr that Google trusts to another Tumblr makes Google trust it as well, so it also trusts everything to which that links in turn.

Jokes, buddy

’      All our judgments, all our conceptualizations of the world refer to absolutes and ideals: Sara is pretty, but not as pretty as Diana, who is not as pretty as the girl on the magazine cover; Jane is smart, but not as smart as the boy who was accepted to Harvard, who clearly is not as intelligent as Albert Einstein was; serving free food is revolutionary, but not as revolutionary as setting a police station on fire. We are truly one-dimensional thinkers: unable to see each individual quality or action for what it is alone, only able to apprehend it in terms of how it compares to others… the implication being that there is some fundamental scale against which everything can be compared. This is one way of conceiving of the world, yes, but not the only way, and not the best way in most circumstances, either.

       This way of thinking makes everything into a competition, for those who don’t want to accept their inferiority; it makes us disregard the value and unique significance of every event and entity, in favor of finding a place for them in the system of calibration. The truth is that every human being really does have a value unlike any other, every radical action and approach is important to “the revolution” in irreplaceable ways (the important question is not which means to apply, but how to make them complement each other), and we desperately need ways to articulate this to ourselves. We need a language with which we can celebrate through description, not comparison.

One Dimensional Life in The Three Dimensional World: Why abstractions, norms, and absolutes are an assault on humanity and existence itself.

thepeacockangel:

Alright dudes (I’m not calling everyone dudes, this is specifically addressed at dudes), say you have a male friend who’s really into black metal, and he wears corpse paint most of the time, and one day he shows up without any on. Do you feel compelled to tell him he’s “still pretty without makeup”?

No? Then why the fuck do you feel the need to say that shit to women?