Comrade Booty Shorts

Honestly, if you think that shit is funny, please reconsider? Some people are genuinely gullible, some people are unaware that shit like this is dangerous, because no one taught them it was, and that’s not their fault. And certainly no one deserves to die because they’re gullible or uneducated. Don’t give me that ‘natural selection!!1! lol’ bullshit. No one. Deserves. to DIE. for being. Gullible. or. Undeducated. 

I know you think it’s just a joke, but some people will genuinely see this and believe you and they might die. Stop spreading misinformation just because you assume everyone knows. 

Identity Politics are always based on flattening out experience, making the critique of society abstract rather than lived.  

Identity Politics promote cross-class alliances, thus offering those with more power (and thus an interest in the proliferation of class society) to silence the most marginalized within these alliances. 

Identity Politics are rooted in the ideology of victimization, and thus celebrate and come to enforce norms surrounding what activity people are allowed or able to participate in. This plays out by reinforcing certain mythologies  about struggle (i.e. “only cis-white-men participate in black blocs or “oppressed people are incapable of certain strategies of revolt”).

Identity Politics are always based on the fallacy of coherent communities. Some French people once said that “there are greater ethical differences within communities than between them.” That is to say that those trapped within certain “communities” or identity confines often have less in common with one another than they do with those who they are purported to be opposed to. This fallacy thrives on abstraction of experience rather than analysis of lived experience itself. A queer in prison has more in common with their straight cellmate than with some scumbag gay senator, and yet the mythology of the “queer community” serves to suffocate enemies of society and subjugate them to their self-appointed representatives.  

Identity Politics are fundamentally reformist and seek to find a more favorable relationship between different subject positions rather than to abolish the structures that produce those positions from the beginning. Identity politicians oppose “classism” while being content to leave class society intact. Any resistance to society must foreground the destruction of the subjectifying processes that reproduce society daily, and must destroy the institutions and practices that racialize and engender bodies within the social order.  

Identity Politics are deployed by, inherently refer to, always valorize and are in and of themselves the State. 

Deep

It’s mic dot com reposting a TED talk tho. Mic dot com is huge in the English-speaking North American progressive sphere. TED is literally a conference for progressives with $60K to blow on feeling good about themselves. People clearly are listening (although the people at TED are usually more interested in listening and then not doing much about it).

The issues are the propaganda for the drug war absolutely surrounds us, sustains the prison-industrial complex which funds the US government, and legitimizes police militarization there and elsewhere. It’s rooted in a deep, old racism and hatred for the working class, and part of deep issues in American and western culture, as well as western imperialism.

It’s common sense that people should not be prosecuted for using drugs and distributing drugs. Paternalistic law is bullshit, and the data shows it. Common sense isn’t what’s stopping it, it’s fearmongering and doublethink. Prof. Hart briefly hinted at it, but definitely did not come down hard enough. It wasn’t starry-eyed naïveté that created the war on drugs so much as a tactic of lying to people to obtain and reinforce power (pretty sure there’s something obtained under the FoIA about it but I need to look).

The one issue I have is decriminalization is inadequate, and both release into the free market and nationalization will incentivize exploitation. Legalization would just be that, only more limited, but less able to be distributed. Collectivization solves those problems though.

Paris Communards, “Declaration by the Central Committee of the National Guard” 1871.

I never get tired of this quote