Educating myself

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.

“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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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).

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) 

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. 

Nuance

Humility

Compassion

Context

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

Perspective

Self-awareness & De-escalation