* Chromatic Delirium *

That’s how we lose and we all get killed. YOU need to be social if you consider yourself a revolutionary and not merely a sympathizer. How are you going to organize the masses without leaving your house and encouraging others to do the same, because it’s discomforting, potentially risky and won’t be easy? Revolution is risk. If you wanted to avoid risky social interactions, you wouldn’t go down the path of being a black sheep by calling yourself a communist revolutionary.

There’s risk in socializing, there’s also risk in organizing and you can’t organize if you can’t socialize! Socializing with your coworkers and neighbors, building connections past alienation, and discussing shared conditions and grievances as workers and tenants is the practice and your homework for organizing a union, a vanguard party or a people’s army.

I’ve had to overcome social anxiety in order to achieve goals greater than myself. This is a skill, not an inborn talent. Challenge yourself because ultimately what we need is to build the conditions to meet the moment, those final series of crises, and that includes at a very basic level that doesn’t exist in places like the United States is community.

You as a communist should be someone who (if able) can be relied upon by your peers. You should be concerned and investigative. You should genuinely care about the lives and the conditions of those around you, because people can smell a salesman.

As a communist you’re not trying to sell somebody on an advertisement for your lifestyle brand, you’re trying to organize people to realize their own capacity for creating social change and leadership. You need to at least attempt to be charming, charismatic, educated, humble and selfless.

Combat your own anti-social tendencies. The ruling class wants you isolated, alone and alienated not only from labor but from humanity itself.

We are trying to win a new future for global humanity in the face of our ongoing climate change induced mass extinction event and the resurgence in fascist and far right politics globally. Take it seriously. Engage with what the masses around you are experiencing, immerse yourself amongst their ranks.

You already are a proletarian and a tenant likely, you’re around workers and tenants all the time, but you haven’t broken the capitalist programming that has told you to resent other people for wasting your valuable time and peace which is money lost, to fear social risk and failure so much you avoid socializing altogether, and prevents you from gathering in too large a mass of your class comrades in the explicit interest of the bourgeoisie’s counterinsurgency efforts.

I am begging the UK trans community and its allies to attend the Mass Lobby at Parliament on June 25th, 11am-4pm, organised by Trans Solidarity Alliance.

The new EHRC Code of Practice pushes trans people out of toilets, hospital wards, and community spaces. It normalises gender policing based on appearance and stereotypes. It becomes statutory guidance in the UK by the end of June.

Trans people are now legally their assigned gender at birth and must join gendered spaces accordingly, but if they are perceived as their lived gender, they can also be ejected from those spaces. The guidance says: either break the law, or don’t pass too well.

A mass lobby is where you invite your MP to discuss your concerns with you in-person. Ask your MP to:

Demand full parliamentary scrutiny, debate, and use their free vote on the EHRC Code of Practice.

Support any motions rejecting the EHRC guidance. As of June 4th, Labour MP Nadia Whittome has submitted a prayer motion - Early Day Motion 240, please ask your MP to sign this.

Write to Bridget Phillipson, the Minister for Women and Equalities about our concerns

Your MP does not have to be an ally, they do not have to respond to your email for you to show up and greencard them (details below the cut.) What matters is that as many people as possible show up.

I cannot stress this enough: Showing up in person matters. It is much more effective than petitions, emails, and letters.

It is a horrible, stressful time, and I am so sorry if you're trans and live in the UK. But I was at last year's mass lobby and the line for greencarding alone stretched around the back gates. It was a record breaking mass lobby and made us impossible to ignore. Let's do even better this time. Details under the cut:

Check this out.

Yeah so tumblr has actually raised thousands of dollars for direct conservation actions to conserve the critically endangered pygmy raccoon. Some things funded include:

Necropsies

Veterinary care and lab tests for sick animals

Food for animals in rehab

Gas money to go rescue animals in trouble after hours when my partner doesn’t have access to the work van

A small plot of land to start building outdoor rehab enclosures on and potentially house long term residents

Vaccines

I explained very clearly to the manager my issue with the meat section not having the price tags listed, and they claimed it was only going to be for the meat, since meat is by weight, and the price of each item is printed on the packs of each item.

Sure. That’s how they get their foot in the door. Fast forward not even two weeks, and here we are:

Bar codes. No prices, no item descriptions. No price stickers on the individual items. Heck, not even the name of the item that is SUPPOSED to be there.

No. The only way to see the price is to scan it on your phone app, which is also recording what you looked at recently, as a way of gauging what you might be looking for in the future.

So here’s what we’re gonna do gang:

Every time you go into a store that has implemented these price-less tags:

Take 1-3 items up to the cash register. Ask the cashier for the price, or hit the price check item on the self checkout, which will likely call over the attendant.

Express that you didn’t actually want it, you just couldn’t see on the shelf how much it was.

POLITELY, AND WITH A THANK YOU FOR THE PRICE CONFIRMATION, Give the items to the cashier or attendant to put back.

When they inevitably try to push the app, politely decline. If pressed for why not, say you don’t want to have to carry your phone in-hand the whole time you are shopping in order to see how much things cost. (Not having cell service or data to use the app is NOT a valid excuse, as stores already often have complimentary WiFi AND more stores will provide WiFi rather than give up on this push for surveillance pricing)

If it’s a shelf-stable item, the cashier will have to set it aside, taking up room in their limited operating space, and eventually pass it off to someone to put in a holding area to put back later. If it’s a fridge/freezer item, it might have to get tossed due to food product sale regulations.

In either case, you are making it a pain in the ass for them to have these digital bar codes. Tie up the checkouts. Give the employees more busywork that the company has to pay them to do. Hurt their bottom line having to toss the pint of ice cream you carried around in your cart for 20 minutes before giving it back to the cashier.

Allow me to preface this by saying that I am an unabashed lover of fanfiction as a genre. I have been consuming it for more than half of my life, and I doubt I will ever tire of reading it. It is a beautiful medium that allows people from all walks of life to participate in a wonderfully enriching creative endeavor, and the idea of someone giving their free time to create something out of pure enjoyment for the craft will forever move me.

However, I sometimes wonder whether the increasing popularity of fanfiction has skewed the general public's expectations of what purpose original stories serve, what they should look like, and what the proper audience-author relationship should be.

I am saying this because I have noticed, in the several fandoms I have been involved in through the years, that there is a growing tendency for fans to write statements such as "X should have happened" or "Y should not have happened", "X character doing XYZ felt so OOC", and honestly, these statements just baffle me, because they are often not framed in a "I wish" sense, like someone generating prompts for an AU or something, but as genuinely valid criticisms of the story.

The last statement feels particularly offensive to me, because it is literally IMPOSSIBLE for a character in canon to be OOC. You could maybe say that a certain story choice feels badly justified or underdeveloped, but it still remains a fundamental building block of the story in question, and it should always be taken into account when discussing it within the context of canon.

The concept of OOC-ness, in my opinion, is something that can (and should) exist solely in the fanon sphere. When an author creates fanfic or fan art, that person is allowed to pick and choose the elements of a character they want to highlight, which might or might not be radically different from the canonical version of said character. They also should be free to do it without facing any backlash for it; fanfic is a big sandbox, and we're all allowed to play in it.

Besides, much of the appeal of fanfiction is self-indulgence, and I use the term without any sort of moral judgment attached to it: as I said, it is a medium made literally for free, by the people for the people, so if there's any type of art that is allowed to be 1000% self-indulgent in this world, and have no guilt associated with it, it is fan works. XD

However, that same logic of self-indulgence cannot be applied when critiquing original works, and I wonder if the growing popularity of fanfiction we have witnessed in the past few decades has caused people to overlay this specific kind of "fanfiction logic" on the way they perceive original stories as well, fundamentally tarnishing their experience of these "primary sources".

okay, so i was thinking earlier this week about Andor (as usual), specifically about the final line from the segment of Nemik's manifesto we hear: "...Remember this; try."

and it got me thinking about the other times we've had the act of trying, of attempting something, in Star Wars, decades earlier: "Do or do not; there is no try."

these two statements and the characters they represent are so fascinating to me. from the perspective of Yoda's philosophy, Nemik is a naive idealist fighting against a system he cannot hope to overcome, which consequently results in his death. Nemik tried to do the impossible, failed, and died. and then, we have Yoda, a relic who chooses to lives in hiding because he knows that there is no way he can take down the Empire, ultimately allowing him to survive the 18 years after Order 66 and train Luke. Yoda survived because he chose to not try, and lived.

however, from the philosophy of Nemik, their positions are radically changed.

Yoda lived alone for almost two decades because he knew he couldn't win against the Empire. he took no action, offering no support to the Rebellion, despite the fact that he is quite literally the most powerful Jedi who has existed in centuries, despite his wealth of knowledge that can be used in the fight against fascism, despite his knowledge of other Jedi that existed in the galaxy who needed his help (ex. Ezra speaking with Yoda in the temple). Yoda didn't try, despite the myriad valuable contributions he could have made to defeating the Empire, because he believed that he couldn't.

meanwhile, Nemik is a freedom fighter. his whole life's work is trying. against the Empire, a single person is meaningless. it is a hulking monstrosity of cold bureaucracy, impersonal massacres, and dehumanization. and above all, it functions on fear. the very act of struggle is a massive undertaking that shakes the very foundations of the mass of the Empire. trying is the whole point. the point isn't to succeed, it's to amass and gain momentum, to fail and fail and fail and try and try and try and hope and hope and hope until- the wall breaks. Nemik's pure love for freedom and his struggle against a tyrannical creature more powerful than himself inspires Cassian Andor to join the Rebellion, whose later actions go on to enable the destruction of the death star by Luke Skywalker. if enough people try, they can do.

I think Yoda's quote has been often misinterpreted because it's taken out of context, which makes it sound like some sort of normative prescription against "trying" as in "making an attempt to achieve something". But taken in its full context, this is clearly not what Yoda meant. This is the full context of the quote, from ESB:

"Luke: Master, moving stones around is one thing. This is totally different. [He's referring to trying to move his X-wing out of the swamp where he landed it when he and R2-D2 arrived on Degobah.]

Yoda: No. No different. Only different in your mind. You must unlearn what you have learned.

Luke: All right, I'll give it a try.

Yoda: No. Try not. Do… or do not. There is no try."

There's a million ways to interpret these few lines of dialogue - ESB is regarded as the best SW script and movie for a reason - but in essence what Yoda is telling Luke is that there should be no difference in his level of commitment when doing a small thing (moving a rock) or doing a big thing (moving an X-wing); that Luke should commit fully to whatever he is doing, be it big or small, and trust in the Force. And if he learns to do this properly, the underlying message is that the Force will listen.

I don't find this idea at all in conflict with the message of Nemik's manifesto. When Nemik says that "even the smallest act of insurrection pushes our lines forward", he's basically trying to convey the same concept as Yoda. Nemik's manifesto is obviously more overtly political, while Yoda's message is more mystical and spiritual, but the idea behind their philosophies is basically the same:

"There will be times when the struggle seems impossible. I know this already. Alone, unsure, dwarfed by the scale of the enemy. (...) One single thing will break the siege. Remember this: Try."

"No. No different. Only different in your mind. You must unlearn what you have learned. (...) Do or do not. There is no try."