I wonder how many anti-communists you could convince by arguing that capitalism is secretly communist and the only thing that’s not secretly communism is workplace democracy and the abolition of private property (changing the phrasing, of course)

An AU where Pennywise ends up in Free Derry and it does not end well for him.

“Protestant giant alien spider or Catholic giant alien spider?”

Also I Am SO Careful

With my phrasing when I’m writing about politics so as to make sure I’m not misconstrued. I see a lot of even pretty decent people who definitely didn’t say anything actually bad getting dog piled not even for using “politically incorrect” terminology, but just like phrasing things in an unclear or even just a slightly unfashionable way and it’s just like “I don’t think this is how we win” you know what I mean?

And like I’ve found that basically, you can say nearly anything in nearly any space if you know how to phrase it for your audience and get a good or at least not a bad response and it’s just… ridiculous to me that that’s how politics works.

The fact that fashionable terminology within LGBTQ circles changes back and fourth and like which identities are fashionable shifts from era to era suggests to me that sometimes changes in terminology have less to do with political progress than with fashion and a sort of weird semi-magical belief that if we found the perfect terminology material circumstances would change.

A few years ago queer was the THING TO BE and identifying as lesbian or bisexual was unfashionable… and before that identifying as a lesbian was THE THING TO DO and it’s just like… IDK it feels like a substitute for actual liberation like if we said our right words the straight/cis folks would leave us alone, but like as much as I understand the theoretical shifts that have lead to the linguistic shifts… it doesn’t work that way.

If You Are A Leftist

Liberals and others are going to attack you, not just from points of view they know you find abhorrent, but from within.

Especially in the US. COINTELPRO was and remains intensely effective. If you are a leftist, do you really think capitalism isn’t clever enough to figure out that attacking head-on isn’t the way to destroy our organizations?

They know what issues we worry about. They know to accuse us of misogyny, homophobia, racism, transphobia, ableism, even liberalism because they know that that’s shit that can actually divide us, that those accusations will actually stick and matter within our communities. Tarring effective organizers with those labels works, because those labels are actually things we abhor and accusations of those kinds are very difficult to refute.

Which is not to say that those issues or accusations should be ignored, just that the guilt on accusation and the “no one is redeemable” purity politics I see happening a lot are not a way to win.

You Know As Much As It’s Easy To Roll Your Eyes At 90s Edginess Now

I think it’s important to remember that it came out of a sort of “happiness patrol” era of chipper bigotry in the 80s, the Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Regan polite and sunny hypocrisy of that period,

the beginnings of mass incarceration,

the homophobia, the casual misogyny, the nationalism, the dismantling of labour law… all with a lot of media censored of all the ugly shit.

Y’ know what I mean?

There was a reason for discourse being the way it was. Shock value was a protest against a very genuinely censorious establishment. It’s lead to bad places but it didn’t start there.

Also so I was reading through a list of communists the other day and a lot of the old school ones were novelists or media creators, and like we don’t do that as much anymore.

I think we need to make more entertainment media that explains and valorizes our perspectives.

I think we need to infiltrate Hollywood

I Really Just Hate Punitive Justice

I feel like one common assumption we really need to fucking kill is the assumption that suffering somehow improves people, or like is either morally redemptive or improving. The fact that we talk about punitive “justice” as paying for a crime, or paying your “debt to society”? How does imprisonment or punishment or suffering “pay” anyone ANYTHING?

Like there are two things you can do to deal with people who do damage to other people 1. You can take evidence based steps to rehabilitate them and make it so they’re not likely to be a danger 2. If you can’t rehabilitate them which y’ know we can’t with some people yet (the Charles Mansons of the world) you can get them into a situation where they can’t cause further harm.

Punishment does nothing but indulge our worst impulses

P.S. If you’re wondering why my content has been less political lately

It’s because I’ve been too sad to cope with political work and have taken a step back from doing that for now in the hopes of recovering enough to get back to it in the future.

Northern white people who use the term Redneck to distance themselves from their own racism are shit.