debate me, bro

Reblog if you think ‘transmasc lesbian’ is a valid identity

So you agree — that work under capitalism is often grueling, thankless, and exploitative, and that people become depressed and alienated when given no choice but to sell their labor in a system of inherent power imbalance between worker and boss? So you agree — people would be happier if they worked less and got to spend more time among loved ones? So you agree — your atrophied social imagination molded by eons of imperial civilization can only conceive of a world with domination-by-patriarch or a world with domination-by-plutocrat?

"Will you free my Palestine"

“Every leader kills people, including my leader. Every leader kills people. Some kill more than others. Leadership requires killing people.”

-Tucker Carlson

Liberal outrage over Carlson saying this to excuse Vladimir Putin—immediately before Putin had Alexei Navalny killed—is beside the point. Supporters of Carlson, Putin, and Donald Trump admire killers. Disapproval is not going to shame them out of this.

Liberals are only offering a more milquetoast version of the same vertical political model. This can put them at a disadvantage today. As push comes to shove in a world in crisis, leaders who have openly presided over killings are drawing more and more support. Think Tayyip Erdoğan—or Benajmin Netanyahu.

The anarchist alternative is to seek to distribute agency horizontally: not to worship leaders and glorify the state and its violence, but to become capable of self-determination, making it impossible for anyone to systematically dominate others. In the long run, this is the only real alternative to authoritarianism.

"Leadership is a social disorder in which the majority of participants in a group fail to take initiative or think critically about their actions. As long as we understand agency as a property of specific individuals rather than a relationship between people, we will always be dependent on leaders—and at their mercy. Truly exemplary leaders are as dangerous as the obviously corrupt, in that all their praiseworthy qualities only reinforce their status and others’ deference, not to mention the legitimacy of leadership itself."